[usastandsunited]

Sex made the internet what it is today

Wrong.

[Hodar]

So, do you think the majority of internet companies are selling cookies, or sex? Are the tons of pop-up ads selling Tupperware, or sex? As much as I like FR, places like this encroached upon businesses that established the internet. Those businesses were sexual in nature. Sex sells.

[jiggyboy]

Hodar is correct. Paying for sex not only made the internet what it is today, it quite literally made (paid for the creation of) a significant portion of the internet itself. Here's an article from a Silioon Valley weekly in 1999:

As ISPs upgrade their equipment to accommodate the vast amount of bandwidth porn requires, they buy routers from Cisco Systems and 3Com. Porn webmasters pick up superfast servers from Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics. Search engines like Yahoo and Altavista reap ad revenue from banner ads and collect hits by providing easy access to porn. Porn surfers buy DSL lines or cable modems from Excite@Home, Covad Communications, Northpoint Communications and Pac Bell.

Perhaps most directly profiting from porn traffic are Silicon Valley's huge ISPs that provide server space, connectivity and bandwidth to the most visited porn sites on the web...

Sex and the Internet