jayeff

Any ideals I ever had were knocked out of me 40 years ago. I didn't write "should", or "perhaps", or "I believe". I wrote that "this industry will create a professional association". And it will do so for exactly the same reason as every other industry - formally or informally - has done: because people at the top decide that order is in their best interests. The timing I suggested is a guess, but all industries go through the exact same cycles and there is no reason whatever to believe online porn will prove unique.

When your income is $100K a year, it can be worth scamming someone out of $1K. When your income rises to $1M a year, a scam which nets $10K is hardly worth the bother. That simple reality changes who your victims must be: you can no longer scam the small-fry no-one cares about, who are too numerous and lack the means and will to organize.

The cynics who say that business is only about money are right. But they are absolutely wrong when they say that because of that, anything goes. That is only true so long as those who do have the clout to pull things together, are not themselves victims of instability. I don't imagine any of the early cattle or oil barons believed they would soon be footnotes in the histories of their industries, but economic inevitabilities pay no attention to human arrogance.