Cybererotica president Jonathan Silverstein \nMIAMI BEACH - So far, those in the content side of the adult industry say they support the Federal Trade Commission's crackdown on Internet porn looping - cautiously. They applaud attempts to stop the practice but worry about another opening for another heavy push of government regulation compromising the business.
And several who spoke while attending ia2000 called for some kind of trade group forming in the business to take on that very issue, although who would or could contribute time to such a group seems to remain a very open question.
"It's probably good for the industry, but I'd rather see us control it ourselves, which we have the power to do," says Stephen Huntington, co-owner of California-based Janey's Web Service (www.janey.net), of the FTC crackdown. "Some of the larger Webmasters could be helping a lot of these smaller sites (become) more responsible in what they do."
Earlier this month, the FTC announced an arrest and a major crackdown on the practice. It involves plagiarizing a Web page, then inserting a line of Java script into the page's coding so that an unsuspecting user entering the page's URL gets thrown into a loop of adult sites which might take as many as twenty browser-closing clicks before the user breaks the loop.
The practice can also entail stealing domain names and scripting the page accordingly enough to send the unsuspecting surfer into the loop.
Most such loopers are said to be very small, almost mom-and-pop style adult Web sites who either lack resources or lack the scruples to generate traffic other than by hijacking Web surfers in this high-tech variation of the classic bait-and-switch routine.
"If we're not managing our own industry," Huntington says, "someone else will, whether the FTC or another agency." He wants to see more aggressive efforts by the larger operations, including perhaps a governing board to address these and contiguous treats to the industry's survival.
"I think that what's being done, sites doing that, puts a black eye on the industry as a whole," says Cybererotica president Jonathan Silverstein of the porn loopers. "We're here to do a legitimate business…people like that make it hard for people to trust us when there's no reason not to trust us."
Silverstein says the FTC crackdown will help in the short term. "People know they're going to get in trouble for doing something like that, then a lot of them are not going to do it."
But he's not quite prepared to endorse more regulations. "The only thing that we can do," Silverstein says, "is try to be the most ethical business that we can be and try to impart that on to the people we do business with."
He says that Cybererotica - who has been victimized by domain theft turning into porn looping in the past - will simply cease any partnership they have reason to believe is conducting unethical business, including and particularly porn looping. "I don't want to be involved in something like that," he says.
Content providers aren't the only ones in the adult industry paying attention to the porn loop crackdown. Jonathan Lieberman, who runs JMR Creations, an adult traffic consultant and service provider, says the FTC involvement is both good and bad.
"I think the more involvement in regulation there is, the more difficult it is to run the business and the more potential there is for over-regulation," Lieberman cautions. But in the specific porn looping cases, he says, the FTC crackdown was the right thing to do.
"What people were doing was unconscionable, stealing sites and stealing traffic, it doesn't work for anybody in the long run," he says.
Lieberman, too, supports a strong industry trade group getting together to take on the porn loopers. "But the trouble is," he says wryly, "is that everyone's willing to contribute a little money, but nobody's willing to contribute much time to running it. Because everybody's busy and no one really has much time."
And Lieberman also warns that stopping the practice, even with a strong industry trade group forming in the near future, if it does, could still prove extremely difficult - if not impossible. One critical reason: the Internet's entry barriers are so low, compared to how big the world has become since the Internet began in earnest.
"There's so much money to be made if you figure out some clever way to cheat people," he says. "I never heard about these guys (porn loopers arrested in the U.S. and Australia earlier this month). How do you stop them, then?
"There'll always be something of a wild, wild West (online) because we're now global," Lieberman continues. "When you open it up around the world, you're at the whim of government stability's around the world…(and) it seems to me that there'll always be international issues involved."
