chiyo - 9:27 am on Apr 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

>>Adult material is what has paid for the net as you use it today. The pioneering companies of the net were almost entirely adult, paying huge bandwidth bills to bring the material to their clients. A good part of the net's infrastucture in the last 8 or 9 years has been built with adult money.<<

Sorry to go off topic but this is just an urban myth that gets repeated so often people may actually start beleiving it. We all know the NSF and the US military set up the infrastructure, and academics and institutes designed the basis of the software. The pioneering companies of the net were never anywhere close to "entirely adult". And to say that "a good part of the net's infrstructure in the last 8 or 9 years was built by adult money" is another claim with no base in fact. It would have happened anyway, with much better quality. Who cares if this "industry" paid for a lot of bandwidth, thats between them and their clients. OK i accept they were pionners in some online marketing technqiues when the web went comemrcial, but they contributed far more to teaching others to spam, heaving useless and insulting content in from of people who didnt want it, and caused bad PR for the medium which still has to be totally got rid of. In fact the crass marketing techniques that this industry popularised were not a small factor behind the poor marketing/ad models in Web phase 1 that caused the first dot com bust.

If Google wants to index adult content for those who want it and can keep it out of the face of those who dont, so be it, but to make out the so-called "adult" indutry as web angels just does not cut it sorry. As I said, an urban myth.

[edited by: chiyo at 9:40 am (utc) on April 13, 2003]