What is the percent of reasources of major backbone providers in the
US are used by the porn industry on the internet and how does that
translate into money spent by those providers that are reflected into
the cost of their services to consumers and business that are not porn
related?....

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Request for Question Clarification by haversian-ga on 12 Dec 2002 21:33 PST

How do you mean?  Are you referring to peer-to-peer trading of
pornography, or to legitimate pornographers selling their product?  In
the former case, I don't think you will find numbers separating out
pornography as opposed to other video and photo files that get traded.
 In the latter case, the resources are paid for and don't cost anyone
but the buyer.

One could reasonably argue that the more pornography moves onto the
internet, the cheaper it becomes for the rest of us.  The marginal
cost of bandwidth is constantly decreasing, so the more bits get
shuttled back and forth, the less each one costs.

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Clarification of Question by anatom-ga on 12 Dec 2002 21:54 PST

Your right you or I could never figure the difference between video
and image files traversing the net, I was wondering if someone or some
ISP had done some study or anything related to this subject with
regards to percent of porn traffic.

Not nesscarly that there are direct costs passed to the consumer, but
as the need for bandwidth grows part of that need is bandwidth for
porn, and as traffic is past from network to network that legit porn
web site didn't pay for all those lines only their connection.

Let me know If this helps at all...

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Clarification of Question by anatom-ga on 13 Dec 2002 09:25 PST

So the answer is 0%?

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Clarification of Question by anatom-ga on 13 Dec 2002 10:47 PST

So a better question would be: Would there be any difference in price
to a home consumer of broadband or dialup in the US if legitmate porn
companys where non existant on the internet? Refering to how big the
driving force for these porn companys (websites,bandwidth) played in
with increasing capacities of major backbone providers in the US,
which are like haversian-ga said telcos.

I think I made my question sound like I was blaming porn for the price
of my net connect, or at least thats the way you interupted it. And
the other way around on that I not looking to justify the porn
industry for making my connection less expensive.  I am merely looking
for monetary statistics in realation to cost incurred by these telcos
building their backbone networks that is in direct realtion to
bandwidth required by this industry.

On the point of telcos using only a fraction of the actual fiber
laided. They laided that fiber with projections for future bandwidth
needs in mind, those projections came from past bandwidth growth, I
doubt they said okay lets just lay as much as we possibly can and see
if we use it later.  Part of those projections came from all traffic
on their networks including porn, now you say we can't measure how
much porn, we do agree it played a role, if the more porn the cheaper
is your view point. What if no porn at all then those portions of
projections of bandwidth wouldn't exist and therefore the actual
amount of fiber would have been less in actually costing the customers
of these telcos less.   Unless it played a big enough roll in
increasing capacity of telco networks which forced new devolopments
and technologies in data transmission which in fact reduced the over
all cost.

I understand your points on theory of it cost everyone less because of
porn, I understand your theory that my thesis is flawed but I put the
10$ up to get an answer not to be right or wrong, a answer with some
facts from reasources on web like how the majority of other questions
are answered on GA.... You say that these stats about net traffic are
unrealiable, well if you could post these stats that are unrealiable I
would gladly accept that as the answer to my question.

The problem isn't so much an organization's willingness to collect the
information you want, but rather the ability of that organization to
collect the information.  Censorware has been shown to be remarkably
ineffective (a study I read about 6-9 months ago put effectiveness at
about 50%) in detecting both textual and graphic pornography, which
indicates that categorizing by content will be ineffective.  As the
Napster debacle showed, categorizing by filename is even less
effective.  So, with no way to identify what is pornography and what
is not, I don't think you will be able to find the numbers you are
looking for.

In the second part, I think you are forgetting some details.  If I, as
a pornographer, am going to be serving out 100GB/month of traffic, I
have to pay someone for that connection.  The ISP I pay has agreements
with the telcos that own most of the backbone bandwidth, and the rate
I am charged is based on the extra load I place on their networks as
well.

Consider a customer of mine across the country.  I need to shuttle a
500M movie to this person, which will travel through fiber optics
about 99% of the way.  Whoever laid the fiber needs to recoup the same
expenses whether my movie is the only thing that travels through the
pipe, or whether it is one of 1000 things.  The problem becomes even
greater when you consider that the cost of laying 100 fibers is about
twice the cost of laying 1 fiber, so there is an incredible amount of
unused fiber in existence.  If pornography doubles the amount of
traffic on the web, the fiber costs are amortized over twice as many
paying customers, so each customer pays less.  The network
infrastructure on both ends of the fiber is also less than twice as
expensive for twice as much (half a rack or a full rack take up the
same amount of building space).  All variable costs scale with
bandwidth, and fixed costs are dived by more paying customers as
bandwidth use increases.

I think your original thesis is flawed.  It sounds plausible, but it
just isn't true.

Is 100% a valid answer?

Several problems with the question!

1.  The definition of porn is, in itself, not the same worldwide. And
are you interested in legal, illegal, or both.  As well as private vs.
commercial exchanges, and other variations.

2. As  haversian-ga  pointed out, as usage increases, operating costs
per "unit" generaly decrease. over the last 30 years, the cost of
sending data has decreased incredibly, due to technological advances,
driven by demand, much of which is in areas never forseen back then
(email itself is relatively new, as is much of the internet's
capabilities.

3.  How do you define cost?  The money spent on porn related websites
(users and/or site operators)? The social "costs" of the porn
business?  The money spent by the entire industry?

There is much more to the question than could be answered in a few
pages, let alone an extensive research project.

If I were to setup a website, serving any content, porn or otherwise,
the cost of my internet connection will be more or less directly
proportional to any additional costs my traffic places on the network
as a whole, both for my isp and the backbone internet providers. As
such, the premise of the question is flawed. As pointed out by others,
it could be argued that increased usage, in this case for pornography,
could actually reduce the per unit bandwidth costs of all other users
of the internet.

The truth is: Internet Service Providers lie about providing
"unlimited" service for a set fee. Whether you're uploading something,
or downloading something; if you're downloading too much of it -- your
Internet Service Provider will either cripple your service or
terminate your contract.

If you'd like to see how much heavy users of bandwidth are actually
paying, take a look at this. http://janey.net/paypolicy.shtml

I believe the ability to collect this information is there, just
companies do not want to release this information. For example, Google
does not make statistics regarding pronographic requests available.
Also MSN excludes pronographic requests in published site stastics in
order for it to be meaningful.

So there you go, in my opinion pron has to be a large portion of the
Internet traffic. The Internet is full of porn, just search on Google.

I believe the ability to collect this information is there, just
companies do not want to release this information. For example, Google
does not make statistics regarding pronographic requests available.
Also MSN excludes pronographic requests in published site stastics in
order for it to be meaningful.

So there you go, in my opinion porn has to be a large portion of the
Internet traffic. The Internet is full of porn, just search on Google.