This item caught my eye tonight in our Wet Spots over at Fleshbot, Feds’ Expert: 1 Percent of Web Is Porn. One is such a lonely number. I’m even more intrigued with the other numbers in the article, and what they mean for the US government’s approach on safeguarding against minors’ access to adult content, how little the legislators know or understand about online porn (and the internet in general, no surprise there), COPA, and filtering software. Basically, the government study effectively hands the government its own ass with the data. Snip:
“[Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at University of California, Berkeley] also examined a random sample of search-engine queries. He estimated that 1.7 percent of search results at Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, MSN and Yahoo Inc. are sexually explicit and 1.1 percent of Web sites cataloged at Google and MSN fall in that category.
About 6 percent of searches yield at least one explicit Web site, he said, and the most popular queries return a sexually explicit site nearly 40 percent of the time.
But filters blocked 87 percent to 98 percent of the explicit results from the most popular searches on the Web, Stark found.
Stark also said that about half the sexually explicit Web sites found in the Google and MSN indexes are foreign, making them beyond the reach of U.S. law. But he agreed with government assertions that the most popular sites are domestic.
‘COPA – right out of the bat – doesn’t block the 50 percent (posted) overseas,’ [ACLU attorney Chris Hansen] said. “So COPA is substantially less than 50 percent effective.'” Link.
Don’t you wonder who they think the “most popular” sexually explicit domestic sites are? I sure do.
