'Porn King' Says Google Should Block Porn Access

mikesd81 writes "The Register has a story saying that one of the world's biggest porn producers wants Google and other search sites to put up barriers between kids and adult entertainment. 'Steven Hirsch, the co-chairman and co-founder of Vivid Entertainment, is to deliver this message on Saturday in New Haven, Connecticut as he addresses an army of Yale University MBA candidates. "Responsible companies in the adult industry such as ours have done a great deal to deter minors from accessing adult material," Hirsch proclaims from inside a Vivid press release. "None of the search engines and portals, but particularly Yahoo and Google, has taken any significant steps in this direction.'"

Comments

Bootleggers and baptists

[homer_s]

This is just a very obvious illustration of Yandle's theory:

The Baptist and the Bootlegger

This happened before when the CEO of some major airline called for more regulation of the airline industry and, more recently, when big agri business corps talk about 'our dependence on foreign oil'.

Nothing to see here (for economists anyway), move along.

Vivid's Little Ploy

[ausoleil]

Google does have some cursory protection against adult material appearing. From the Google site's Preference's page:

Google's SafeSearch blocks web pages containing explicit sexual content from appearing in search results.

Granted it is not a completely effective deterrent, but the Vivid web site offers little more than an assent click and age verification -- not exactly a strong wall to keep out minors either.

That leads me to believe that Vivid is more interested in squeezing out the little guys (pun unintended) in the business and gaining larger market share through greater obscurity on search engines.

Re:XXX domain names.

[SCHecklerX]

That's stupid. If you must do something with domain names, then create '.kids' and make it kiddy safe. This makes much more sense, since then you can 'deny all; allow *.kids' on your censoring device of choice.

average user cannot make this distinction

[v(*_*)vvvv]

Google is not a "content provider", they are a content aggregator Technically correct. It is unfortunately the average user cannot make this distinction.

Re:XXX domain names.

[rs79]

"I was pointing out that your scenario was just a naive and simple-minded as expecting people to stop looking for it. Sorry if that went over your head. "

It didn't go over my head and it's rediculous to assume people will stop searching for it. Porn is what drove the internet to the length, depth and bredth is it today. Half the .com zone are porn names - or were last time I looked at around the 30 million name mark.

Of course it's a simple plan. Very simple. You then have to ask yourself what returns you get for such a tiny amount of effort and it appears to be substantial.

The .com namespace is overloaded. There has been widespread consensus on this for almsot 15 years. It was supposed to be split up according to Jon Postel's plan a decade ago but big bussiness in the form of their intellectual property attornies colluded with the US government behind the scenes to block the introduction of new tlds. These (mostly 3-letter companies) spent tens of millions of dollars that I know of to lobby in DC to block new tlds that I know of, and dollars to donuts it was way more than that. It was never part of the "open and transparent" process the government insisted was the mandate. The inflection point should you care to look, was when Mike Robbers scuttled the 4th IFWP meeting in Boston; by then the fix was in and it was clear Ira Magaziner had lied to us.