Why Porn Industry Lusts For Net Neutrality

The biggest bandwidth hog on planet Earth is the porn industry.  Online porn is a $3 billion dollar business responsible for 35 percent of all Internet downloads.  Viewers spend over 10 million hours viewing online porn.  The dirty secret is the industry is behind the push to reinstate net neutrality.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 late last year to repeal so-called net neutrality.  The decision was handed down nearly two years from the date President Obama bullied the FCC into approving the regulation after the agency initially balked.

Of all the political and regulatory terms, none is more misleading than net neutrality.  The Internet has always been impartial, open to all content, users and firms. The clever use of "neutrality" implies otherwise.  The name is a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the issue and manipulate public sentiment.

Under the Obama FCC, the commission issued a regulatory fiat that requires internet providers to treat all web traffic equally.  That sounds fair, right?  But the porn industry along with Google, Facebook and Netflix supported the regulation to maintain their profitable business models.

Access to the Internet is provided by AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and other providers who build the on ramps.  Without delving into the technological weeds, these access points include fiber, wireless towers, switching hubs and other infrastructure that costs billions of dollars.

The providers have been accused in the past of throttling or degrading traffic.  Big gobblers of bandwidth have complained about unfair discrimination in the treatment of their Internet traffic. The complainers want the telecom providers to spend more money to handle the traffic they create. 

Under their business models, firms that generate most of the Internet traffic do not have to invest in the network required for increased bandwidth demands.  That gives a free ride to Netflix and the other behemoths listed above. Most net heads have no clue that bandwidth is not free.

The porn industry lusted over the old model endorsed by Mr. Obama that guaranteed they could create an Internet traffic jam without worrying about consequences.  It has been a boon for online porn.  Today there are 24.6 million Internet porn sites on the web, which attract 40 million viewers.

A single site, Pornhub, brags it has pumped out 91 billion videos since its debut. There are 44,000 visits to the site every hour.  Viewers have watched 4.5 million hours of pornography, consuming more than 3,100 petabytes of bandwidth.  One petabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

All those viewers reached Pornhub by using an extension built by one of the Internet access providers listed above.  Because it doesn't have to invest millions of dollars in Internet access, Pornhub can afford to offer its pornography for free, hoping to hook viewers into signing up for a paid service.

During the FCC's rule-making on net neutrality, the porn industry spent millions of dollars in social media.  An industry post on Twitter read: Imagine paying for porn.  #NetNeutrality.  Young millennials, who expect everything online to be free, were most vocal about keeping net neutrality.

The fake news media continues to peddle the story that the FCC decision spells the end of the Internet as we know it.   Net neutrality under the Obama Administration was nothing more than a Trojan Horse for controlling Internet content.  The goal was to shackle conservative websites.

The charade should have been exposed long ago. But big media has been building its own versions of online newspapers, television and radio.  Like the porn industry, they want the Internet service providers to offer more and faster bandwidth to their online subscribers. They are co-conspirators.

Thanks to the conspiracy, the pornography industry dominates the Internet.  Every 39 minutes a new porn video is created.  More than 2.5 billion emails every day contain porn. Search engines such as Google receive 116,000 queries every day for child pornography.

Net neutrality has been profitable for the burgeoning porn industry.  It is an sordid business that is addictive, destructive and demeaning to women.  By repealing net neutrality, the FCC under President Trump has made an important step toward reducing the subsidy of online pornography.