jayeff

You have to know perfectly well this isn't the first skirmish. Nor will it be the last.

The primary appeal of working in online porn is the promise of easy money and during the 90's in particular that promise was widely fulfilled. Thus the industry has attracted many people who never thought of it as something long-term and many more who, although they have been around for years, still can not or will not think long-term.

That's pretty much the profile of any new industry but it means that right now online porn is dominated by people who have made good financially, but have no more business sense than the day they started. A few will finally wake up, more will be displaced and the cowboys will end up where they belong, on the sidelines. But for the moment, they are going to fight to be allowed to go on working the only way they know how.

Zango and operations like it are only significant as the current symptoms of an immature industry. There have been others and there will be more. With increasing competition and a rising number of professionals, each time an issue gets aired, the reaction will be louder and involve more people. That's part of the process of online porn growing up. But it is a process: however noisy they may get, these aren't battles which individually are going to win or lose a war.

Online porn, just like every other industry, will get the message eventually. Things will change, not because people suddenly discover ethics, but because they discover common sense. You can surround yourself with 20 paid guns, but someone else can hire 50 and still you can both be shot by one man with a rifle. Once that very obvious reality sinks in, in every walk of life, humans organize themselves into orderly communities. Business is no different, look at banking and oil in particular, and see how the robber barons who stayed on top were those who eventually led the way to "respectability". The rest are barely a footnote in the history books.

This battle will, on the face of it, be lost. There are still plenty of webmasters willing to stand up and boast about promoting scumware. The business standards of some of our leading sponsors are most noticeable by their absence. It doesn't matter. The more competitive the industry becomes, the more professional webmasters will need to be to survive and prosper, whether they like it or not. The more they learn, the less tolerance they will have for the concept that anything goes.

That's what will bring about the change and 5-10 years from now it will be inconceivable that a major sponsor will have anything to do with scumware, stolen content, warez and the like. Those things will still exist, but only on the crumbs which fall from the table. Meanwhile we get to enjoy the periodic dramas