Google 's New Porn Policy: Free, Possibly Illegal Porn Only, Please

Google ‘s New Porn Policy: Free, Possibly Illegal Porn Only, Please! 

– Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com. 

Back in March, Google published a charming little note regarding an upcoming change to its AdWords policy regarding “sexually explicit content” – the universally accepted euphemism for filthy, naughty, awful porn. Showing a real talent for understatement, Google termed an effective ban on porn advertising to be a mere “update” to its existing policies.

Read on…

Google said it “made this decision as an effort to continually improve users’ experiences with AdWords,” but the practical effect of the decision might be viewed a bit differently by “users” who also happen to own adult websites and/or produce adult content. From where they sit, it’s another slap in the face from a company that seems to be doing its level best – intentionally or otherwise – to speed the demise of the adult entertainment industry.

Given that Google’s organic porn-related search responses are stuffed to the gills with sites that are distributing free porn (with or without the consent of the producers of and copyright-holders to said porn), AdWords listings represented an important means of establishing at least some visibility of their products as items available for purchase, as opposed to merely another in an endless series of fuck flicks freely available to anyone who stumbles across them.

As for the social conservatives celebrating the change to Google’s policies, it seems to me that they are missing the point; AdWords listings wasn’t where most people were finding their porn – it’s just where a lot of paying adults were finding their porn. If the likes of Morality in Media are sincere in saying that their anti-porn crusade is largely about protecting kids from the allegedly detrimental effects of viewing porn, this policy change accomplishes almost nothing toward that goal.

All that has been accomplished here is the further marginalization of adult content producers who have tried to play by the rules – not just Google’s rules, but intellectual property laws and federal regulations that pertain to the adult industry, like section 18 USC 2257, the body of laws and regulations that regulates the storage of records documenting porn performers’ ages and identities. It’s also a section of law widely ignored by adult tube sites, who typically maintain that because third parties post the videos on their sites, the tube site operators themselves are not subject to the law – a position that has never been tested in court, by the way, and that might well prove incorrect if it ever does receive the scrutiny of the court.

All in all, the change in Google’s policies punishes those pornographers who have invested the most in operating professionally and ethically, and impacts least those who have created the conditions that groups like Morality in Media typically decry. This policy change takes dollars out of the pockets of entrepreneurs who employ people and pay taxes, and has no impact at all on criminals who illegally distribute other people’s porn for their own profit, and do so successfully in no small part due to their ability to exploit Google’s algorithmic preferences and search-relevancy standards.

By favoring “deep” adult sites that offer a lot of keyword-relevant content over sites that place their porn behind a password wall, Google actually pushes people searching for porn toward sites that do nothing to restrict access to porn. In other words, the sites most likely to display porn to anyone who passes by are also the ones most likely to be happened upon via Google. Since it was largely adult subscription sites that made use of AdWords, and adult subscription sites typically do more to restrict access to their porn, the AdWords policy change has made free porn sites even more dominant within the market-sustaining traffic of the Great Googleverse.

So…. Congratulations, Morality in Media, if you truly believe you had something to do with this policy change. What you have accomplished is making free porn even more prominent within Google – a fact that won’t change until or unless Google goes even further with all this and begins removing porn from its organic searches, too.

If that chapter of the Google Porn Debacle ever comes to pass, mark my words: the last porn available via Google will be the stuff that is most certainly being distributed illegally. In other words, and in paraphrase of my monomaniacal friends over at the NRA, when porn is outlawed, only outlaws will have porn.