The recent web pornography ban in Egypt has raised questions about the evils of censorship (and porn) and the changing tide of popular attitude of Egyptians. It perhaps reflects the emerging influence of more conservative Muslim elements in government, a shift that worries moderates. Apparently the same ban was passed 3 years ago but was not enforced because their filtering system was not effective.But porn bans are nothing new. Other countries with strict censorship laws like China and Saudi Arabia have successfully implemented bans that restrict pornography along with anything else they deem inappropriate for public viewing. In 2010 the UK discussed a ban that would require users to specifically request access to pornographic material from their internet service providers. And porn-banning rhetoric has even stomped through the US news media over the last few months, thanks to GOP also-ran Rick Santorum claiming President Obama is failing to enforce pornography laws. (There have also been some awesomely ridiculous pornography PSAs.)Given the universality of the pornography censorship discussion, it’s curious that the Egyptian ban has received such thorough coverage from western news media (BBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, The Daily Mail, and so on) The internet pornography ban in Egypt was passed by a lower court and has yet to be implemented. People on the ground in Egypt are quick to point out that internet pornography is still accessible, and that the court ruling has gone virtually unnoticed by most Egyptians.
Political significance aside, the Egyptian porn ban does invite another interesting question: How much internet traffic is porn traffic? There have been some crazy statistics over the years that seem to be based largely on either nothing or flawed measurement models. In one particularly egregious example, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers actually claims that 50% of all divorces are related to internet pornography.Actually, porn only amounts to about 4% of the traffic on the web, according to the most comprehensive research statistics on pornography web traffic collected by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam for their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts.In an interview with Forbes last September, Ogas explained their method of evaluation. “The best way to evaluate what amount of web traffic that goes to porn sites is by looking at the number of sites out of the million most highly trafficked websites and seeing how many are porn sites (about 4% according to us, higher than Philip Stark's random-sample 1.5%).”The percentage of internet searches that are pornography related is around 10-15%. Ogas points out that the percentage of porn traffic has gone down over the years as more women started to use the internet. (No comment.) He also found that Republican states download more porn than Democratic states. (No comment Rick Santorum, either.)The most popular porn site by wide margin is Livejasmin.com, which is essentially a webcam. It allows viewers to interact with the webcam subjects directly, most of whom are from southeast Asia or eastern Europe and make an average of $8-$15 per hour. Livejasmin gets over 32 million visitors per month, which amounts to about 2.5% of Internet users overall..XXX domain addresses went on sale last year in the US, but they have failed to attract many sites because the .xxx addresses are too easy to filter and censor. If fact, it seems the only people buying .xxx addresses are folks who want to snag their personal or company name before someone else turns it into a porn site. Religious groups were freaked about the .xxx domain names, worrying that the catchy suffix would attract even more pornography deviants, but that hasn’t come to fruition.It remains to be seen how the pornography industry will negotiate its presence on the internet in the future, but it’s safe to assume that some creative censorship circumvention will be needed, and that the porn professionals are up to the challenge.
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