The The I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Happy 2015 everybody.

Finally, after many months, a proper chapter episode is in store for today.

This is chapter six, entitled A History of Internet Porn.

So, the idea for this chapter began when I ran across this quote from Star Trek

television producer Rick Berman. He said, quote, without porn and Star Trek, there would be no internet.

End quote.

Honestly, as a child of the late 80s and early 90s, that's a notion that I have to say really kind of rang true to me in a tongue and cheek sort of way I guess.

I mean, it's something you hear all the time the idea that pornography often leads the way with any new technological innovation

that porn is some X large percentage of the overall internet.

Do you ever wonder how much of the internet actually is porn?

How much of this idea we have that porn is sort of in the background of everything we do on the internet.

How much of that is true?

If it's such a large amount, then wouldn't it be worth investigating how exactly porn has shaped the web and the

internet generally?

That's sort of the thinking that led me to begin thinking about this chapter. To be honest with you when I began researching this topic I was not entirely

sure that there would be enough there to write a whole chapter on. I was also surprised, although I don't know, maybe I shouldn't be surprised,

to find that no one else had really ever done a comprehensive history of internet pornography as an industry.

I guess maybe I'm not surprised but I don't know. Anyway this is taken a bit longer than I thought

because it does turn out that the data and other materials were sort of hard to come by.

It seems like this is not something that people consider a legitimate topic for business or industry history.

And then of course the pornography industry itself is more than a little shy when it comes to

publicity concerning their business practices.

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