The report, used as the basis for Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s proposal to impose a 25 percent tax on adult material, states that adult companies aggressively market to minors and eschew effective age verification systems.
“Senator Lincoln brought out this report to support her bill,” Free Speech Coalition Communications Director Tom Hymes told XBiz. “While it doesn’t put into doubt the good faith of what they’re doing, it’s implicit in the report that there is very little original research in it.”
Hymes pointed out that some information supporting Third Way’s findings was taken from Dick Thornburg’s 2002 report, “Youth, Pornography & the Internet,” which itself relied heavily on 1998’s dubious Meese Report on Pornography.
The Third Way authors did not interview any members of the adult community.
“At least with the Meese Report seven years ago,” Hymes said, “they actually talked with people in the industry.”
Various facts in “The Porn Standard” were used to support the advocacy group’s findings, including an unattributed quote from the Thornburg report that “the industry itself admits 20 to 30 percent of its traffic comes from youth under the age of 18.”
Likewise, the report claims that elements within the industry market porn to children, citing the 2003 case of a Florida man who used misspellings of popular children’s domain names to redirect surfers to porn sites.
Owners of adult web sites, already wary of a summer of increased federal scrutiny, still find the idea of marketing to children “ridiculous.”
“First off all, we wouldn’t do it,” JerkoffZone.com’s Tony Malice told XBiz. “Second, which child has a credit card?”
Hymes noted that the report is out of date and references long-ago abandoned business practices.
“No one is using ‘per-click’ anymore,” Hymes said. “It’s all rev share now. People don’t make money from clicking through [websites]; they make money from joining up.”
And joining requires a credit card, which is not available to children.
The report says that age verification services [AVS] are based on an honor system that is woefully inadequate, but porn producers do little to tighten security.
Industry agent Harry Weiss says that, while the object of a website is to attract customers, it is counterproductive to market to children, and webmasters understand it is in their best interest to keep children out.
If a savvy child, as the report calls them, manages to lie his way through a small AVS, Weiss sees that as a parental issue.
“When I was growing up in New Jersey,” Weiss said, “and I did something my parents didn’t want me to do, my hide got tanned.”
Hymes repeated his — and he believes the industry’s — willingness to take part in any discussions of regulation, but noted that both the recent Brownback and Lincoln meetings had no adult industry involvement.
FSC attorney Jeffery Douglas, in an interview with ABC News, asked if a piece of legislation on the trucking industry, for example, would ever go through without consulting at least one member of the trucking industry.
“It wouldn’t happen to them; it shouldn’t happen to us,” he said.
One curious aspect of the report is that it comes from a group that bills itself as progressive and an alternative to the conservative re-branding of America.
As part of a worldwide movement, Third Way groups claim to support liberalism in social affairs as well as lower taxes.
The U.S. branch of The Third Way is comprised mainly of former Democratic party operatives. The group sponsors initiatives to strengthen the presence and increase the relevance of the Democratic Party.