Sorry, you might have to start paying for porn now

pulse

December 19, 2017 9:05 AM

The FCC's net neutrality repeal could spell bad news for your porn habit.

If youve been plugged into the news today, you might have noticed the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality regulations.

Essentially, the move allows for internet providers to pick and choose how they charge users for content, instead of treating all data on the web equally.

This is scary for a number of reasons—among them, the devastating fact that the existence of online pornography is about to get a lot more contentious.

In the future the FCC just set into motion, you're probably going to have to pay more if you want to use services owned by competing companies. Here's a frightening example Newsweek laid out regarding TV and movie streaming services like Netflix and Hulu: "Simply put, big companies will have the ability to block or deter companies that compete with their own offerings," reporter Robert Valencia explained. "For instance, if AT&T wants to create a TV series that competes with a similar show on Netflix, AT&T may slow down Netflix’s service to your house."

Naturally, the fight for net neutrality has fired up smaller content creators that rely on a free internet—and adult entertainment aggregators are a prime example.

"Without [net neutrality], the cable and wireless companies that control internet access will have unfair power to pick winners and losers in the market," Pornhub vice president Corey Price told Motherboard.

Basically, we're about to live in a world where your internet provider might limit or up-charge your access to pornography. Nothing is set in stone yet, but now there's nothing stopping a giant ISP from curtailing your access to Pornhub because you haven't purchased their "adult entertainment package" or whatever—and that's a huge blow to the free-porn utopia we've been enjoying over the past couple of decades.

The net neutrality repeal could also affect the quality and quantity of the porn available. As xHamster spokesperson Alex Hawkins told Motherboard, the majority of that site's catalog comes from amateurs rather than major production companies. Curtailing internet speeds, Hawkins explains, could lead to a severe depreciation of the number of people uploading their own videos, adding up to an X-rated landscape that's a lot safer and more vanilla than it is today.

"Net neutrality is the first step in making the U.S. market align with more conservative regimes across the world, not just in terms of porn, but in ideas about sexuality," Hawkins said.

So, prepare yourself for the possibility that you'll have to start paying for smut. Maybe we all need to go talk to our dads to get a better understanding of what this dark age is going to be like.

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