INDUSTRY VIEWPOINT - The Net's debt to pornography

Mr X of Unipalm says that although porn may play too big a part on the Internet, the ugly truth is that it has been a key technological driver.

What do VHS video recorders, recorded telephone services, satellite television and the internet have in common?

The uncomfortable answer is that all of these owe a significant part of their success, and widespread adoption, to pornography.

Despite its inferior sound and picture quality, VHS won out over Betamax in the key US market because VHS cameras were much cheaper. So when cost-conscious 'independent' blue movie directors embraced video, VHS was the obvious choice of format, in turn driving uptake of domestic VHS VCRs.

Telephone chatlines and satellite channels have also benefitted from the blue dollar in their formative years. And, like it or not, the internet is the latest example of how peddlers of sexual content can drive technological change.

Take almost any type of Web content delivery mechanism. Online audio, video, interactivity - the trailblazers and early adopters of all these technologies were the smut sites.

E-commerce also gained its spurs through trade in adult material; high-profile e-commerce sites like Amazon, the book vendor, are merely the exceptions to the rule. According to Zona Research, US Net users alone will spend $350 million this year on adult sites.

And many ISPs are at least partially reliant on fees from the estimated 80,000+ pornographic sites. Paradoxically, pornography's presence on the internet has also driven other advanced applications, such as Web filtering tools that report on or deny access to adult sites, from sophisticated corporate server-based products such as WebSENSE, through to shareware such as NetNanny.

Of course, no one in their right mind can condone the potential for human exploitation that the pornography industry represents, or the personal harassment of 'porn-mails', or the increased incidence of accidental access that online pornography inevitably leads to. It is certain that on an individual basis, there is a need to protect people from unwanted invasions of offensive and illegal material, but there are also far-reaching implications for employers, too.

Companies need to ensure their employees are not wasting work time or valuable bandwidth, or even breaking the law, by using their Net connection for viewing and downloading illegal pornographic or other offensive material.

With the increasingly pervasive nature of the internet, both at home and at work, people may need to take action to avoid material that may offend them or their employers. Shareware applications such as Cybersitter can be deployed on home PCs, and in the workplace, solutions such as Websense from NetPartners monitor, report on and block access to undesirable URLs, cutting the risks of legal action being taken against companies in which blue material is discovered.

And in fairness, many pornographic sites have implemented password or pay-access systems to protect themselves against the threat of litigation (yet again stealing a march on the corporate world in their widespread deployment of Web access control technology).

So while we adopt precautions to ensure that innocents are protected from salacious content, and that the Web is used as the true business and leisure tool it undoubtedly is, it's quite ironic that pornography has played, and is still playing, a key role in shaping the internet as we know it.