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One of the internet's biggest business.
As the world's media never tire of pointing out, pornography is widely
available on the net, both in commercialised subscription form and for free.
Regulating it has turned out to be a much trickier business than finding it
as every government that has tried to do so has found. Blanket
censorship, in particular, has proved to be impossible. This is
excellent news for the pornography industry, which has taken to the web with
relish. Some estimates show that there may be as many as 4000,000 website
selling or displaying pornography in some form. But a lack of rigorous
research data makes such figures hard to verify, which is why estimates of
the real value of pornography sales vary widely, particularly in an industry
where the size of everything is routinely exaggerated. Amounts of between $2
billion and $10 billion are often bandied about, but a 2000 study by
eMarketer, an online marketing firm, reported that online US sales of
pornography were only $230m in 2001, representing an ever smaller percentage
of total online spend as gaming becomes more popular.
Despite the
difficulties in policing online pornography, criminal investigators continue
to take it seriously. Child pornography in particular is a significant
problem, although the web turns out to be an excellent way of tracking down
subscribers to illegal online content; a worldwide operating in 2002
revealed the names of over 7,000 British visitors to an illegal American
site. |
