Lewis Perdue

Eroticabiz: How Sex Shaped the Internet Lewis Perdue

Sex shaped the Internet as it exists today. Whether you call it "adult content," "smut," "erotica" or "pornography;" whether you consider it disgusting or titillating, the facts are clear that without business and technical pioneers in the online sex business, the World Wide Web would never have grown so big so quickly. Without consumer demand for big, bandwidth-hogging sex pictures and streaming video, Cisco would never have sold so many routers and Sun Microsystems so many servers. Without programming pioneers trying to perfect video streaming software that would deliver images of copulation and procreation to paying customers hooked up with a 28.8 kbps dial-up modem, it is unlikely that CNN would be effectively delivering news clips of global breaking news. Without sex-oriented chat and forums to sustain its early years, America Online might never have survived. The e-commerce payment systems that are so common today would be in a far more primitive stage of development, security and usability. Indeed, without advertising from sex sites, Yahoo! would be just another Web company with a bloody red bottom line.