The Internet is a nothing more than a big porn store, right ? Well, maybe not.
PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (AP) — About 1 percent of Web sites indexed by Google and Microsoft are sexually explicit, according to a U.S. government-commissioned study.
Government lawyers introduced the study in court this month as the Justice Department seeks to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which required commercial Web sites to collect a credit card number or other proof of age before allowing Internet users to view material deemed “harmful to minors.”
What’s even more interesting is that it looks like filtering software actually works:
The American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the law on behalf of a broad range of Web publishers, said the study supports its argument that filters work well.
The study concludes that the strictest filter tested, AOL’s Mature Teen, blocked 91 percent of the sexually explicit Web sites in indexes maintained by Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN
Sounds like we don’t need COPA after all.
November 15th, 2006 at 9:59 pm
[...] Well, I guess it is only 1% – who would have thought. I think, though, it speaks more of the preception people have of the internet than antyhing else. Porn is big business on the net, but there are now so many other businesses and with the rise of blogs, pornographers just can’t put gallery sites up as fast as people can blog. Looks like I am not the only one who is surprised. [...]
November 17th, 2006 at 11:17 am
Is 1 percent of Web sites being pornographic a lot or a little? Let?s do the math.
In 2004, Google claimed to have indexed over 4.2 billion web pages (http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html). Assuming an average number of web pages for all sites, 1 percent of 4.2 billion is 42 million–that’s 42 million distinct pages of pornography on the Internet.
If we use the domain count increase over the past 2 years as an indicator for the increase in websites and WebPages (approximately 20 percent), the number of pornographic web pages swells to roughly 60 million.
So is 1 percent of the Web a lot of porn? Let’s put it this way, if someone spent 30 seconds to view each Web page of porn, it would take about 57 years for that person to view it all.
Or better, if you had a Playboy/Penthouse magazine that had 60 million pages in it–not including the articles of course–the magazine would be as taller than any skyscraper on earth, taller than Mt. Everest–in fact the magazine would be approximately 180,000 feet tall, 3.4 miles high.
That … is a lot of porn.
Support the CP80 Internet Channel Initiative which is working to categorize content into Interrnet channels, allow individuals to choose what content they want to access (like cable TV) and protect children from Internet Pornography.