'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.'"

Re:What about me?

[edmicman]

On a more serious note, it's not Google's job (nor should it ever) to filter it's results. This idea is horrible - does this guy even understand how the Internet and search engines work??? Does he expect Google to have one of those "I agree I'm of legal age to view these results" screens? Because those work so well as it is.....

Google Does, Its Called SafeSearch

[Johnny_Law]

Google does block results for certain sites unless you turn off SafeSearch.

http://www.google.com/safesearch_help.html [google.com]

This is merely a PR ploy, which is fine, to deflect some question away from Vivid.

Flickr?

[SilverBlade2k]

Better do something about Flickr too...it is pretty much the largest source of free pornographic pictures.

Leisure Suit Larry

[Statecraftsman]

The most entertaining way to keep children away from inappropriate content is to quiz them on things only adults would know. Of course, if a kid knows how to google for answers it may not work so well but there must still be some questions most adults know but for which google can't provide a solid answer. Not that I can think of any of those questions. If you can think of any please reply.

The central problem is that adult content providers(which could just be some guy with a big hard drive and the ability to upload to a youtube clone) have an incentive to make it simple to access their content if only for the ad revenues. So maybe the best way to attack this is via the advertising. Don't block the content. Block getting paid for posting the content in a form that's too easy for minors to access.

.xxx domains

[asterix404]

.XXX domains were shown to actually be less effective against under age porn viewing mostly because it would create a very close grantee that any domain name with a .xxx suffix would be hit thus making even search engines useless. I mean think about it. If you are say... 14, and want to find free porn and type in freeporn.com, NO! freeporn.net, NO! ahhh freeporn.xxx oh yea...

Don't know about Yale.

[jellomizer]

But my college is putting a large effort in its MBA program to push Business Ethics. Yale may be doing the same thing. Even in a "Unethical" indrustry there is a degree of ethics that they follow and support. Either that or because minors won't pay for the stuff so by blocking them they save the trouble having to deal with "Think of the the Children Groups". There is nothing to gain by not blocking minors so why not.

Bootleggers and baptists

[homer_s]

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

The Baptist and the Bootlegger [reason.com]

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 [google.com] 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:Oh the Humanity!

[sm62704]

I wish you would have added your reasons for saying "profit margin" , but since you didn't I will.

Google will find plenty of dirty pictures that don't cost a penny. This asshat's dirty pictures you have to pay for.

I'd say something about the technical impossibility of filtering out porn but since the thread has been up for two minutes I'm sure someone else has.

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.

Re:XXX domain names.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at .museum which is only for museums, or .arpa or .coop or .mil or .aero for example(s) which all have specific uses.

None of which are content classification. Tell me, should a pornography museum be under .xxx or .museum? DNS is not a content classification system and is totally unsuited for such (mis-)use.

Re:Meta Tags

[jbeaupre]

I'd be happy if the tags were as general as the sections in a bookstore. Not the same, but large groupings of subjects. News, blogs, kids, abstracts, social, commercial, etc. Something like that. Save on having to always be creative with Boolean searches.

There is already a solution to this - robots.txt

[seifried]

Robots.txt [wikipedia.org]

Maybe a simple addition to this standard for a couple of categories like "adult" or "dynamic" or "temp" to designate a simplistic "why" content should not be indexed, thus allowing for some flexibility

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.

Yes I am 18 years or older?

[slserpent]

Responsible companies in the adult industry such as ours have done a great deal to deter minors from accessing adult material

Yes, I'm sure an index page with an age verification is all you need.

Re:Will never work...

[vidarh]

In other words you didn't have any friends with access to German or Danish porn mags. Hustler has always been tame - I remember how disappointed I was the first time I saw Hustler and realized how soft it was.

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.

Re:Oh the Humanity!

[glitch23]

.but we must recognize that there are irrational people out there that believe it's a good idea to shield their kids from having to deal with the world in the hopes that, at some point in the future, thrusting them into said world with a complete lack of practice, understanding, and context will allow them to flourish.

Yes, because *sarcasm on* simple nudity and exploitation of nudity, people, and sex for profit (i.e. porn) are the same thing so kids should be educated early about both without prejudice.*sarcasm off* Obviously one person's irrational ideas of what irrational parenting is is another person's rational parenting when examined properly. Parents will shield their children from porn but they can make the distinction between porn and nudity in and of itself. I have a feeling anyone can make it through the world without being informed of pornography (your complete lack of practice, understanding, and context is fine in this case) and I'm sure many people were able to do so prior to the proliferation of porn via the Net.

I do agree that Google should make it easier for their search capability to be used by children while still making it easy for parents to filter out what they don't want their children to see. Doing it at the domain level would indeed make this easy. This is also why I thought having an entire TLD for porn (.xxx) was a good idea because it would make filtering it easy assuming you could enforce porn sites to only use that TLD. I know some conservative groups thought it a bad idea though because it would lend credence to porn. It would allow easier filtering when desired IMO.

And for search engines to accidentally bypass those filters to display porn isn't their fault. As someone stated, there are ways to prevent search engines from indexing it. Vivid's IT department needs to read up on that before someone complains needlessly. By the way, Porn King? I thought they were talking about me but I guess there is more than 1.