12.02.2004

Net profit and empowerment

Since the conviction of murderer Graham Coutts, who testified to using internet pornography, there have been calls for greater censorship of the net. Manny Neira evaluates the relationship between cyberspace and reality

I do not often read The Mirror, but my guess is that it did not remember the victims of US murderer Ted Bundy with the headline, ‘Killed by the printing press’. This is despite the fact that, on the night before he was executed in 1989, he gave an interview blaming pornography for provoking his crimes: pornography printed in magazines.

On February 5, though, The Mirror ran the headline “Killed by the internet”. This was their comment on the death of young teacher Jane Longhurst at the hands of Graham Coutts, who testified during his trial to viewing pornography: pornography he found on the internet.

There is something about the net which troubles even wiser heads than those at The Mirror. Some years ago, there was a brief stir when journalists heard of something called The anarchist cookbook, apparently freely available on the net, which gave advice on making drugs, weapons and explosives. One website which provided information about the title received so many enquiries, it added the following to its ‘FAQ’ (frequently asked questions) list:

“Q. I’m a journalist. Isn’t it terrible that people can get The anarchist cookbook over the net? Shouldn’t this be stopped?

“A. Note that The anarchist cookbook is available from nearly any bookstore in the US. These dangerous institutions will also sell you Nazi and hate literature, pornography, instructions on growing drugs … as an interesting department of justice report points out, over 50 publications describing the fabrication of explosives and destructive devices are listed in the library of Congress and are available to any member of the public, as well as being easily available commercially.”

The FAQ goes on to list some further fascinating titles - all books, all legally available - including Home workshop explosives, Secrets of methamphetamine manufacture and (I want this one for christmas) A do-it-yourself sub-machine gun. It comments: “For some reason, getting this stuff from a bookstore is not news, but getting it over the internet is.”

Net power

So why does the mere medium of the internet provoke such fear?

The answer lies in two subtle but important shifts in social power the net has brought in its wake. Both undermine existing social controls, and so earn the suspicious mistrust of government and established media.

Firstly, it empowers the young. Many adults watch their children take to the net with an ease which leaves them floundering by comparison. The technology can be learnt, but (rather like a language) seems to be soaked up more naturally by young minds. It might be imagined that, as the current generation grows up, this disparity will disappear, but the technology is changing so quickly that the gap may remain open. While it does, the young will enjoy a power which their parents do not fully share and find difficult to regulate. The net is a space in which the young enjoy unusual freedom, and there is an uneasy social awareness of this: partly because of the risks it entails, but also because of the loss of control in and of itself.

Secondly, it lowers the threshold for self-publication; or rather, it lowers it further, for this has been a trend ever since the invention of the printing press. As print technologies push down unit costs, the ability to publish becomes wider and wider. Organisations associated with the common people could thereby easily put their ideas and programmes into print. Now the net brings the power of self-publication within the grasp of the tiniest group and even most individuals. The de facto censorship of those who could not match the resources of the already powerful and wealthy has been weakened.

Some cyber-utopians have stretched this idea too far, though. The real social battles of the future will take place in the real world: the net is a part of that world, and not an alternative reality. Indeed, the political freedom to publish ideas in any form was won through real world struggle: it did not fall into the laps of working people along with the technological means. It is worth remembering also that power structures in society are amply reflected on the web. The most popular sites are still run by states and large companies. However, the net brings an important quantitative shift towards the ease of democratic expression and, again, the bourgeoisie is aware of this.

Porn laws

I sense you are still concerned. But what about all the porn? It is not just a myth, is it?

It certainly is not. Analysts estimate that 20-30% of the entire traffic on the internet consists of an endless stream of images and video of people dressed with varying degrees of inadequacy and involved in acts of varying degrees of improbability.

Much of it is entirely free, and is simply exchanged between users. A good deal of this is amateur - snapped at home with digital cameras and shared for no more, it seems, than the thrill of sharing it; it ranges from the endearing to the frankly alarming. Who would have guessed what was happening behind those rows of net curtains? Big brother has nothing on this. Much of the rest is scanned in from magazines, or was originally collected from ‘pay sites’.

Indeed, the free supply is such that it is surprising anyone parts with their money to access pay sites at all. Part of the reason lies in the distribution channels. Much of the free material is distributed via the oddly named ‘usenet’: a collection of public message boards or ‘newsgroups’ to which people send emails which may be read by anyone. There are tens of thousands of these newsgroups, most hosting public discussions, on subjects ranging from philosophy to British soap operas. Some, however, encourage people to attach files to their submissions. From these, you can download free music, software, electronic books and (of course) porn. So for the latest Robbie Williams, the full text of Pride and prejudice or images of Frank experimenting with a vacuum cleaner somewhere in Chichester, try usenet. As you might imagine, it attracts millions of users, but is still not as well known as the world wide web: and it is on the web that the pay sites are found.

The porn pay site industry is huge: literally tens of thousands of sites exist, and earn their owners an astonishing $70 billion a year. This money is entirely collected through debit and credit card payments, earning the major banks very substantial commissions.

And here lies the truth at the core of the internet porn industry. Governments have long faced demands for it to be regulated, but have pleaded technical difficulty in ‘blocking’ sites. This difficulty, as far as it goes, is perfectly genuine. The Internet grew from a US military networking project called ‘Arpanet’, the point of which was to create a computer network which would continue to work even if bits of it were destroyed by enemy missiles. Any single block can be bypassed, and information can be moved from one computer to another on the far side of the world and still be accessible. No single government can therefore regulate a determined site operator.

However, governments could regulate the banks, forcing them to vet the nature of any pay site they accepted as a client, and imposing conditions on what it might contain. A pay site unable to collect fees would not have to be blocked: it would be closed by its owners. The government does not pursue this route for the simple reason that electronic porn is big business, and it does not want to rock the boat.

You may recall that in 2000, the mobile phone operators paid the government £22 billion in auctions for licences to operate ‘third generation’, or 3G, networks: an enormous fee paid at the peak of the growth of the mobile phone market, which has left the companies with heavy debt burdens on their balance sheets. In the event, 3G phones, which allow the transmission of pictures, are selling slowly. Desperate to recoup their investment, a couple of weeks ago companies attended a conference sponsored by Total Telecom magazine on the subject of ‘Delivering mobile adult content responsibly’. They hope to recover £6 billion a year in porn sales. Clearly, you cannot control who sees porn delivered to a mobile phone, but you can expect no more intervention from the government here than over the ubiquitous sex-lines swelling BT’s profits.

Exposing government cant, though, should not be taken as an argument for censorship. Consensually produced pornography may not be to all tastes, but the freedom to produce and distribute it is the same political freedom which should be extended to all forms of published texts, literature and art. The state ought not to have any role in deciding what I should, and should not, read or see.

Children

The greatest public concern has been over pornography depicting children. Clearly, a child will have neither the life experience nor the social independence to give meaningful consent, and to have sex or take eroticised photographs without meaningful consent is abuse. However, the focus on this danger may be serving as a distraction from the real problem of protecting children. The vast majority of abused children fall victim to members of their own family: most frequently parents, siblings, or other close relatives. The archetypal paedophile stranger preying on the young is extremely rare, and the number of abductions and attacks committed by such people is very low and has remained roughly constant for years.

Despite the huge publicity which has surrounded the issue of child pornography on the net, in fact it represents a vanishingly small percentage of the total. It makes little commercial sense for most operators to provide it, given the far larger markets and easier profits to be won, at considerably less risk, from providing adult pornography. Jim Bell, who served two years for downloading child pornography, wrote in The Guardian last year:

“The worst child pornography is free, posted on news servers by individuals who want to share their interests with others. By this I mean pictures of small children forced to engage in sexual activity with adults. I remember a picture of a sad little Asian child prostitute in a leather harness, seated on her client’s knee. Such extremes of child pornography are free, fairly easily accessed by journalists and researchers, and tend to set the standard of discussion about this problem. There are a few hundred such pictures that circulate on the internet. Few new ones ever surface: they are part of a grubby tradition of internet extremism.”

The few pay sites which operate do not show such explicit material:

“All the subscription sites I ever came across advertised little girls (I never looked at the ones with boys) looking ‘pretty’. Or ‘pretty and sexy’. The ages would range from adolescent down to perhaps nine or 10. There was a very clear distinction between American and European artistic sensibilities. American sites would feature the girl next door, in a bikini or a sexy little outfit, looking like a fashion model or a pop star. European sites would favour nude little girls indoors or outdoors, singly or in groups, with a high standard of photography.”

Many of these photographs are taken with the consent of parents, chasing dreams of wealth or fame.

“There is a wider perspective to be taken on this. The internet wonderfully reflects western society. It is not a separate world: it mirrors the attitudes and values of ordinary life. The sexualisation of children through television, pop music and fashion is acceptable; it is done for fun. The world of internet child pornography merely completes that process. Please don’t think that the two are unrelated. Many of the American credit card sites I visited purported to offer girls a first step to a modelling career. Of course they did. What better way to get a young girl to pose sexily, and her parents to agree to it?”

Child pornography is clearly an abuse of the rights of children, but the key to the protection of children does not lie in control of the internet. It is made possible by the powerlessness of children in our society, hidden in the core of a bourgeois conception of the family, and fed by the alienation commercial interests have brought to human relationships. The relevant commercial interests are not merely or even primarily those of the pornographers, but of a continuum which is firmly planted in legal and indeed mainstream business norms.

It seems no-one at Jim Bell’s card company thought to question the charge “Pretty Preteens, Colorado - $40”.