Is the Internet for Porn?

Warning posted at Indian Cybercafe: credit Kaustav Bhattacharya/Flickr

Last week, the Indian government made the controversial decision to ban several websites that allow users to share porn online. While watching pornography is not illegal in India (except child pornography), the decision has required Internet service providers to block 39 websites, most of them web forums used mainly to share and store non-pornographic files. The decision has been criticized as being an overreach by the government and as demonstrating the government's interest in regulating what people watch on the Web.

The decision is strikingly reminiscent of a similar decision made by the Chinese government in 2004. China required ISPs and websites to sign a self-disciplinary act to stamp out online pornography, and the government shut down 700 sites, arresting more than 200 people in connection with online porn. In an odd reversal of position, during the 2010 anniversary of the Tienanmen Square protests, China suddenly unblocked thousands of porn sites. Some speculated the government unblocked the sites to calm some of the discontent felt by citizens and distract them from any possible political action.China may have been onto something in using online porn to prevent riots in the street. Last week on Monday night, during the final game of the Stanley Cup, statisticians at the adult website Pornhub kept hour-by-hour tabs on incoming traffic to their site. After the Boston Bruins were defeated by the Chicago Blackhawks, Pornhub noticed a 21% spike in traffic incoming from Boston after the game, with significantly below average traffic coming from Chicago. While Chicagoans were celebrating winning their first Stanley Cup in four years, some Boston fans consoled themselves online.

courtesy of PornHub

Regulating Internet pornography has been an issue in the United States since the advent of the World Wide Web, something made explicit in the short-lived 1996 Communications Decency Act. The issue of Internet pornography recently reappeared in Congress during the December 2011 debates over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) when Rep. Jared Polis entered the lyrics from a popular YouTube clip into the official record. The lyrics came from Avenue Q, a musical parody of Sesame Street, in which a woman tries to explain the Internet to a group of puppets. The clip—titled “The Internet is For Porn”—went viral on YouTube. During the charged debate, Polis declared that “a high percentage” of the Internet is used for porn and labeled the Web “a pornographer’s wet dream!”

Statistics differ on how much of the Internet is devoted to porn. In 2011, Forbes estimated that approximately 4% of the world’s websites are devoted to porn, but other estimates suggest that at least one third of all online traffic is pornography. Additionally, an ExtremeTech article last year found that the porn site YouPorn hosts over 100TB of porn and serves up an average of 950 terabytes of data transfer each day. Based on the number of visits, the largest porn site on the web, Xvideos, receives approximately 4.4 billion page views per month (which is three times the size of ESPN or CNN and double Reddit's traffic) and streams the equivalent of 10 dual-layer DVDs every second. And while most websites are lucky to keep viewers for 3-6 minutes per visit, porn sites average 15-20 minutes per visit.