Contrary to popular belief, most adult industry professionals are quite concerned with the very real problem of children having too much easy access to online pornography. Start up a message board thread on the topic and most posters will quickly tell you that children should not be exposed to pornography – yet opinions vary as to the best solution to this complicated problem.Contrary to popular belief, most adult industry professionals are quite concerned with the very real problem of children having too much easy access to online pornography. Start up a message board thread on the topic and most posters will quickly tell you that children should not be exposed to pornography – yet opinions vary as to the best solution to this complicated problem.

Some feel that parental responsibility is the answer to this difficult dilemma, while others believe any solution must come from within the industry through self-regulation. Webmasters are so concerned about this problem that some even support government legislation, such as the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), that criminalizes the online publishing of materials deemed “harmful to minors” in locations that are easily viewable by children. Yet be warned, fellow Webmasters: Should COPA survive its constitutional challenge and transition into active law, its effect on children’s access to explicit content will be minimal, yet its financial impact on American adult entertainment companies could be significant.

COPA is flawed for a number of reasons, including the “community standards” issue, which the United States Supreme Court unfortunately did not address head-on the first time the case was before the Court on appeal. While COPA might succeed in reducing the amount of easily accessible Web site porn being served up by the legitimate American adult Webmaster community, it would utterly fail to curb porn published by foreign Webmasters, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Kazaa, and Internet newsgroups. And any decrease in Web site porn originating from American Webmasters would only open up more opportunities for the international adult entertainment companies. Since demand for the product won’t be reduced, the supply will just originate from other, easily accessible sources.

So a rational person can easily conclude that COPA is, at best, a kind of lame duck, crafted more for political reasons than practical ones. Yet just because COPA would fail to address the problem at hand – children’s access to online pornography – doesn’t mean that it would have no effect at all. As argued, COPA would indeed result in a large percentage of American adult entertainment companies self-censoring. While the loss of uncensored hardcore in unprotected areas might not be a horrible thing, remember that COPA prohibits not just hardcore, but anything considered “harmful to minors,” which could possibly include (depending upon what jury decides a particular case) nudity, censored hardcore images, sexually explicit sounds, and graphic or explicit text.

Just try building an effective TGP gallery or Web site tour without any of the previously mentioned elements; American Webmasters would be forced to either accept a significant decrease in sales as a result of sterile, uninspired (yet unharmful to minors and therefore legally safe) Web site content, or take extraordinary legal risks for the sake of staying competitive with non-American Webmasters not subject to COPA restrictions. The chilling effect that this law would have on protected speech would not be insignificant, nor would be the financial impact on legitimate American adult entertainment companies.

To sum up, COPA can’t hope to stop children from being exposed to explicit content online, but it certainly could hurt the profits of American companies, while sending a larger percentage of the annual revenue generated from online erotica sales to overseas locations.

The Supreme Court, having already heard verbal arguments in this important legal case the second time the case was before it, will likely issue a decision on the fate of COPA in a few months. There’s reason to be optimistic that COPA will be declared unconstitutional, since the law greatly resembles previous unconstitutional efforts by Congress to regulate online content. Additionally, several key Justices seemed unconvinced by the government’s arguments that the law should stand the test of constitutionality. Yet even if COPA is in fact defeated, we still have two significant problems to address: children’s access to online pornography and Congress’s misguided approach of placing undue responsibility on the adult entertainment industry for the online activities of children.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – only responsible parenting can protect children from questionable online content. Turning a child loose with uncensored and unmonitored Internet access is like turning him or her loose in Amsterdam. When children are involved, some activities simply require adult supervision and guidance. Parents can take simple steps to protect their own children.

Password protecting Internet access on the family computer is a first step – children should get parental permission to surf the Internet, and a password can give parents the control that they need, thus ensuring that their children won’t surf for porn or other inappropriate online content when no adult is present. Placing the family computer in a clearly visible location, such as the family room, is another step; not many children will purposefully visit porn sites when their parents are looking. Installing filtering software is also an important step for concerned parents, as filtering software can block accidental exposure to pornography, and monitoring software can secretly report to parents what sites their children are visiting online and what they’re chatting about in chat rooms. Turning off image viewing in a child’s email application can help protect him or her from viewing adult erotica as a result of unsolicited spam.

Since parents can’t watch their children while they are staying with friends, talking to the parents of those friends and making sure that they have taken similar precautions is also a good idea. The technology is available, if only the parents were truly as responsible as we’d all like them to be where their children are concerned.

As for the government, there are steps that our elected officials could take to provide effective solutions for parents – all it takes is a little creativity, and the ability to put desire-for-results ahead of grandstanding and political posturing.

How much money has the government spent trying to defend ineffective laws like CDA and COPA in court? For starters, why not spend some money to purchase one of the filtering software companies, and then provide their products free of charge to concerned citizens? If purchasing a company isn’t a permissible activity for the government, then it could simply let companies bid on a contract to produce filtering software that the government would then own, or even offer grants to any open source projects that concerned organizations might be interested in developing.

Another step the government might take is to create a Web site with tips and advice, much like I have offered here, that parents can use to secure their children from exposure to harmful materials. Such a site might offer software downloads, help with operating system settings, browser controls, information on where to report child pornography, etc. Such an effort would show an honest effort by government to protect children from online harm.

While most of us in the adult industry are concerned about children having easy access to pornography, the “blame Webmasters” solutions offered by the government accomplish nothing productive. The perfect solution will never exist, but if politicians can just get past selfish agendas and morality pandering they just might find that there are common sense solutions that benefit everyone while making a significant impact upon the problems at hand.

Connor Young is Editor in Chief or YNOT News and TheAdultWebmaster.com.