DBWI: What if the Internet Hadn't Killed Pornography?

As early as 1995, a farsighted observer concluded that "Thus, once access to the information superhighway is as common as the ownership of a telephone or television, we can expect little or no new pornography.... As a medium that facilitates pirating, an unregulated and uncensored Internet will produce for our granddaughters a world that is relatively free of pornography." http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...3_1_pornography-copyright-protection-internet

We all know that Professor Mulligan's prophecy came true, but what if it hadn't?
 
OOC: I am well aware that the internet has indeed created a severe financial problem for the traditional pornography industry, pretty much for the reasons Mulligan anticipated. But his assumption that this would mean the end (or at least a drastic dimunition) of pornography was...not realistic.
 
Honestly? Probally less disease, the industry kept things clean, having things transition to lots of amatures made things cheap but it also has led to a lot of accidents and incidents because of the lack of insitutional know how.
 
Are we talking about the pornography industry not being displaced by amateur porn?
But how would that happen? Even if, somehow, copyright could be enforced and people wouldn't just pirate "industrial" pornography, who's paying for the network infraestructure? "amateur" porn it's a thing due P2P networks, so any commercial pornography would need a way to make money by using P2P. The alternative would be to stream SD video (because, really, who would want to pay for less than dvd quality on this day and age?) directly from a server farm and the costs of that... it simply can't break even, financially speaking (which is, at the end, why we can see pristine full HD movies by renting blurays at Blockbuster but porn is crappy cell phone resolution video). Any business trying to set up such a business model will go the way of youtube: shunned by investors who saw it as the second coming of the dotcom bubble, unable to turn a profit and filling for bankruptcy.

And we aren't even talking about secure payment methods over the Internet, which barely begun to take off by the early 2010s. How would the porn industry expect people to pay for their products if that wasn't an option before the advent of digital cameras and homebrew porn?

IDK, maybe the POD would have to make the Internet more popular to the general public long before cheap consumer grade cameras allowed people to share their naughty bits over P2P? But even then, we're talking about crappy 56k dial up internet, unless you can also speed up the very expensive deployment of broad band internet and its more comfortable 3 Mbps which are the norm today. But, again, that's a massive economical investment.
 
Don't Porn Stars make all their money by stripping these days, much like musicians make more money touring? IIUC a girl does a few movies, gets on the cover of a couple and then hits the strip clubs as 'the star of xxx movie', the clubs put up the door charge and she gets a cut.

So perhaps that's the bubble to pop, the link between porn movies and live action stripping.
 
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