Brace yourself for an outbreak of quite bare-cheeked double standards.
The announcement that Yahoo!, the web portal, is to offer hardcore porn videos and DVD disks through its popular shopping service has caused quite a few ripples across the internet pond.
The move is being interpreted as a big, once family-friendly internet name suddenly getting down and dirty in the middle of the street: anything in the pursuit of those dot.com profits.
There were plenty of quotes from Yahoo!'s appalled rivals to back up the image. One was from Amazon, which said it wouldn't offer anything pornographic, although it does sell a few good sex guides and photographic compilations that would be regarded as pretty racy in many circles. Best of all, a spokeswoman for AltaVista said "I think our shopping site is meant to be a family friendly arena."
AltaVista? Family friendly? That policy must have not reached prissy old AltaVista's better known search engine. Type in the word "sex" there and - even before you've even begun to explore the results of the search - AltaVista's halo is falling, tarnished.
A banner ad for a porn site appears at the top of the screen, featuring a pretty blonde model and a bare bottom. A family would have to be pretty long in the tooth, and pretty liberal with it, before "Scandinavian hardcore" and "teen sex videos" - two offers that lurk one click away via that banner ad - became "family friendly".
Indeed, by those standards, Yahoo! has been ultra-cautious: visitors cannot access the site's Adult and Erotica store without parting with credit card details and personal information. That must put enough barriers in the way, one would think, to cause inquisitive children to look elsewhere for their adult material.
And there are plenty of other places where interested surfers can get their porn, of course. Online sex has been big business since the early 1990s, when up to 80% of net traffic was thought to have something to do with nookie.
Since the commercialisation of the web in the late 90s, "respectable" research houses have produced far fewer surveys on the popularity of the online sex industry than they used to, but the numbers that do exist are interesting.
We have to look back to 1998 for the last set of figures from Forrester Research, which estimated the US online adult entertainment market to be worth around $1bn, and around a tenth of the whole e-commerce market.
There are no estimates of the size of the European market, although Jupiter MMXI says Spanish net users are the greatest consumers of online porn in Europe, with 34.5% of surfers there logging on to blue sites (against only 24.7% of users in the UK).
Worse of all, of course, the kiddies could always access the Yahoo! web directory where, since the dawn of internet time, users have been trawling through Yahoo! lists of sex sites for somewhere to visit.
There's no credit card or personal information needed there: type "sex" into Yahoo! and you are given a choice of 469 categories and 3407 sites, along with another banner ad; "Live Now: Nikki! click to meet Nikki!" (click to meet Nikki, by the way, and you get landed at a warning screen urging minors to go away).
And that is perhaps the most obscene thing about this tiny extension of the internet porn industry: that this is actually a move by Yahoo! into the adult business. In fact it, like many other respectable online names, has been using sex to add to the bottom line for a long time.
Were they really concerned about making their websites puritanically family friendly (and that would be a shame, wouldn't it?), they'd have to turn them off and start again.
Useful links
Yahoo
Amazon
AltaVista
Forrester Research
Jupiter MMXI
