Users of Google’s Blogger service just received a rather nasty surprise. From March 23rd they’re going to eliminate all adult blogs. If you purely have text content you might escape the purge, but almost all blogs I know and enjoy feature the occasional photograph or video clip (hmp, servitor, Victoria Vista, RedRump, etc.). That puts them directly in Google’s firing line. As Bacchus has written in the past the pornocalypse comes for us all.
It’s a horrible act of vandalism. There’s millions of pages of pages out there that people have poured millions of hours of work and thought into. Some fraction of them might get relocated, but huge chunks will be lost and all the links that have been established between sites will be trashed. In the past I’ve written sympathetically about how adult content gets treated in large technology companies. I often think it’s a lot of small bad decisions and subtle social pressures that leads to adult content getting treated as a second class citizen of the web. However, in this case it seems to be a single and deliberate decision. A particularly poor, thoughtless and cruel decision.
Of course the important thing to remember when you’re using a service like blogspot (or facebook, or gmail, or yahoo or any ‘free’ offering) is that you’re not the customer. You’re the product. And companies kill product lines all the time.
I’m sure many bloggers will be cursing the person responsible for this over the coming months. Perhaps it’ll help to imagine it’s the gentleman in the image below and he gets a stripe for every blog killed. This image is particularly suitable to feature here as I found it on the Femdom Times site, which has now been suspended for violating the WordPress TOS. Originally it’s from the Femme Fatale Films site.
Technically, the Google notice is just about nudity, although in practice it is probably broader.
You know, over the four years of my blog’s existence, it frequently featured castration, torture, slavery and fat old men dressing up in frilly little dresses. I have written a story in which two young ladies kill a man by pouring acid over him and then sexually get off to one of their former teachers being eaten alive by ants. I’ve done a story where a man is framed for rape and spends years in a Venezuelan jail just because someone wanted to make him cry. There are captions featuring forced lobotomies, violent whipping, toilet slavery, some extremely unlikely and disturbing surgical techniques and even one about a punishment igloo. And they’re worried about nudity…
I think they also broadened it to sexually explicit material as well as nudity. Not everyone is going to be turned on by your curious brain, but I think most would agree the images and captions are sexually explicit 🙂
-paltego
It is a nasty surprise indeed. If you search you’ll find that one third of all internet traffic is porn-related (1). When I was in college we had a case study about why VHS won the video standards war. They allowed porn and Video2000 and Beta-max did not. Sex sells. Google has no problem with censorship in foreign countries (2, 3) which makes the announcement to ban explicit sexual content – other than for artistic, educational, documentary, and scientific purposes – all the more puzzling. Once upon a time Google was the company that wanted to free all the information in the world but these days Google has turned itself into the moral police – or rather the Judge Dredd: judge, jury and executioner – of the internet. For many Google is the gateway to the internet and the it has now decided to ban content that is perfectly legal. To add insult to injury it does so on the very same day the FCC plans to announce its decision on net neutrality, something Google supports.
I choose Blogger because I do not want to register an adult web address in my name but it looks like I have to find a new place to host my blog.
(1) http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23030090
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Google
Sex was definitely a significant aspect of the home video wars, and Sony was notoriously slow to pick up on that. However, I think the recording length was also a major element of the beta v’s VHS battle. Being able to get a long movie or a full sports broadcast on VHS was a big advantage.
When it comes to registering a site you can pay for a privacy service. I think it’s around $9.99 a year in the US to employ a service to manage the domain registration for you. Obviously it sucks to pay anything for that, but it’s not a huge cost. From the latest reports it looks like Google may be rethinking, so potentially you may be OK to continue with blogspot.
-paltego
I suspect this may have to do with Google making inroads into China.
Beware the Great Firewall, peoples! It’s coming, you just know it is ðŸ™
The Google China relationship would make for a book in itself. It’s sometimes friendly and sometimes very antagonistic. Fascinating collision of politics and money.
However, as I wrote up in my later post, while a corporation may have a culture, I think it’s a mistake to think of these kind of individual decisions as being particularly high level or political. I work for and know lots of people in large tech companies. And often these kind of decisions are made a surprisingly low level by a very small number of people. In the big scheme of things the blogging service is a tiny fraction of the company and therefore the people responsible for it will probably be relatively junior. Stars and high flyers like to work for this high profile projects, and blogger isn’t that.
-paltego
I got the same msg from Blogger, today.
It made me drive the nuts. Only “authors” (i understood “bloggers”) and those who are listed by their e-mail will be able to see the content.
Its completely stupid. Because if someone give me his e-mail to add him in my blog list, does not means that he has the legal age. As a blogger, i have no means to verify that the sender is legal viewer also..!
So, we have to switch to private mode if we want to “Survivre” but… what? ?? I ll be able to see your blog just because i am blogger too ? Its silly.
I think once you have to move to a private mode for blogging, it’s no longer a blog. At that point it’s a private group. As you say, you’ve no way of knowing who is interested or what they’re age is. Any 99% of the traffic will vanish, because the casual searcher, who may have enjoyed the content, will never bother to sign up for a private site. It’s basically the kiss of death.
Hopefully Google are reconsidering (based on the latest stories), but who knows if that will be the permanent solution.
-paltego