The chief defense that I’ve seen of the federal government’s obscenity crackdown (for instance, see Clayton Cramer’s post, though several other correspondents made the same point) is that it may decrease the availability of porn through non-Internet commercial channels: cable, for instance, or hotel pay-per-view.
But so what? If you think porn is bad for people, and for their neighbors, how will drying up these channels do any material good, when another channel — the Internet — is so broadly, easily, and inexpensively available? Cramer is right that prosecutions might “remove[ porn] from ‘respectable’ distribution channels.” But the respectability of the channel is not, I think, high on many porn consumers’ lists of desired characteristics. And any tiny decrease in consumption may well be offset by an increase, for instance as people who are used to seeing porn videos on cable will find they need to get good Internet connections instead, and, once they get them, will realize that they can get much more online than they ever could from the cable company. So I stick by my description of possible outcome #1: U.S. consumers will be using just as much porn as before.
Still, my post wasn’t just about that: Rather, I was asking what the government’s likely next steps would be. One possibility is that the government prosecutes some U.S. pornographers, sees some apparent success as hotels and cable channels stop running porn, notices that people are still using lots of Internet foreign-distributed porn, and decides “OK, we’ve done all we really can. Sure, all our prosecutions aren’t really changing people’s consumption, but that’s fine. We’ll either keep going with the futile prosecutions, or close up shop.”
The other possibility, though, is that the government isn’t going to be happy just with the limited effects that Cramer and the others describe. Remember that the planned prosecutions are of the producers, not of the cable companies and hotels, which after all are also distributing porn and thus potentially legally liable — this makes me doubt that the government’s ambitions are limited to blocking the hotel and cable distribution. Rather, people will say: “Look at this foreign cyberporn loophole — we’ve got to close it.” And what will they need to do to close it? Well, either my option #2 (mandated nationwide Internet filtering by service providers, with a blacklist of sites maintained in real-time by a federal agency) or option #3, locking up porn consumers.
The bottom line remains the same: The options for the government are either futile traditional enforcement, or potentially effective but highly intrusive novel enforcement. You decide which one is more likely; but neither seems particularly good.
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