Commentary

The Porn-Less Cookie

It was not without some amusement that I read the plans for The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA), an industry trade group, to come up with a content classification system--purportedly to help wireless carriers filter "adult content," but really to keep the Feds from sticking their blue noses into what is becoming a lucrative business for cell providers.

Although I am the only person in the continental United States to publicly confess that I have bookmarked a couple of porn sites (well, naked movie stars, not porn per se), SOMEBODY else out here is also sneaking a peek. Diane Mermigas wrote recently that "more than $4 billion a year is spent on video porn in the United States, which is more than major league sports. That reflects the rental of more than 700 million porno movies, the production of 11,000 porno films, more than 30 million people logging onto more than 70,000 adult pay Web sites, and adult ring tones and content for cell phones."

And there are those Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson tapes that somehow circled the globe faster than Joseph Jaffe can home-produce a golf ball ad.

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This, at the same time The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports there is "broad public support for several proposals now being considered for curbing indecent material in the media."

I think these are the same people who recite the Lord's Prayer on Sunday, then get back to business as usual on Monday.

Who can't argue that e-mail and porn probably drove the growth of the Internet as much as anything else? Through the bubble and post-bubble years, red-blooded, God-fearing Americans kept buying porn and turning it into perhaps the most lucrative industry on the Internet. All the credit card fraud and redirects aside, what other sector supports 70,000 pay Web sites?

With so many good citizens howling about indecency while clearly eating their cake too, I have decided that people don't really fear for their "privacy" online, they just don't want anyone to know that they are clicking-through to see how teenage girls in Eastern Europe kill an afternoon with overweight guys sporting tattoos and 5-o'clock shadows.

Consumers think that cookies are little spies on their computers that report back to companies they've never meet or even heard of, where they go online, and what they're looking at. Do you think they really care if anyone "watches" them check their online portfolio or read the news or see some movie previews? Nah. But they want to be damned sure no one finds out that in the privacy of their own homes (or work, love those T3lines), they are checking up on what Chloe Sevigny does to that guy in "Brown Bunny" or Tawny Roberts performing a rather thorough, apparently pleasing, instrument-assisted, self-administered gynecological exam.

Look at all the crap that consumers have to deal with to get to porn sites, from take-over pages, having their home-page hijacked, redirects, false links, a fair amount of fraud, you name it--but 30 million people somehow endure it. Yet they allegedly get bent out of shape about an occasional pop-up or an ad that floats over their copy? Do I detect a little double standard going on here? It just shows that if you have the right content, the consumer will find you, no matter what the difficulties.

Maybe part of the newborn industry initiative to educate the consumer ought to be the disclaimer that "our cookies don't track your visits to naked people."

Might just solve the problem right then and there.

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