Internet pornography

Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the Internet, primarily via websites, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The availability of widespread public access to the World Wide Web in 1991 led to the growth of Internet pornography.

A 2015 study finds "a big jump" in pornography viewing over the past few decades, with the largest increase occurring between people born in the 1970s and those born in the 1980s. While the study's authors note this increase is "smaller than conventional wisdom might predict," it's still quite significant. Children born in the 1980s onward are also the first to grow up in a world where they have access to the Internet beginning in their teenage years, and this early exposure and access to Internet pornography may be the primary driver of the increase.

Pornography is regarded by some as one of the driving forces behind the expansion of the World Wide Web, like the camcorder VCR and cable television before it. Pornographic images had been transmitted over the Internet as ASCII porn but to send images over network needed computers with graphics capability and also higher network bandwidth. This was possible in the late '80s and early '90s through the use of anonymous FTP servers and through the . At this time the internet was mainly an academic and military network and there was not widespread use of the internet. One of the early Gopher/FTP sites was at tudelft and was called the Digital Archive on the 17th Floor (List of websites founded before 1995). This small image archive contained some low quality scanned pornographic images that were initially available to anyone anonymously, but the site soon became restricted to Netherlands only access.

Usenet newsgroups provided an early way of sharing images over the narrow bandwidth available in the early 1990s. Because of the network restrictions of the time, images had to be encoded as ascii text and then broken into sections before being posted to the Alt.binaries of the usenet. These files could then be downloaded and then reassembled before being decoded back to an image. Automated software such as Aub (Assemble Usenet Binaries) allowed the automatic download and assembly of the images from a newsgroup. There was a rapid growth in the number of posts in the early 1990s but image quality was restricted by the size of files that could be posted.

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