Here’s How The Loss of Net Neutrality Could Affect Free Internet Porn

It’s bad.

Despite some overheated claims, Thursday’s FCC vote to end net neutrality—the idea that all online traffic is created equal—will not take your internet access away. What it will do is nearly as bad in the eyes of many—no net neutrality leaves internet users at the mercy of the corporations who control access. 

And that means those companies could choose to eliminate the ability to freely binge watch anything on Netflix, play every 10-hour Nyan Cat Youtube video, or devour eight straight hours of Xhamster’s finest MILF cumpilations. 

As Mashable notes, this loss won’t just unleash providers’ ability to jack up rates, charging more or less for types of use—it could potentially destroy the wonderful worldwide mosaic of amateur XXX:

But now that internet service providers will have the option to control what we can access, they’ll be able to stop the free flow of what we all want most. Platforms like Pornhub and YouPorn have been vocal in the fight against net neutrality, and the loss of it will likely reshape the entire industry.

Clearly this will affect anyone’s ability to freely and anonymously consume whatever it is they’re especially into. But it will also severely impact anyone’s ability to upload their own amateur videos — meaning the adult landscape could get considerably more boring. 

Obviously porn—like its close companion rock and roll—will never die. But without net neutrality in place it will damn sure be much more complicated to publish and to watch.

Playboy interviewed an expert on the constitution and he made perhaps the most spooky point of all about such huge changes to internet use:

“It is foreseeable that many individuals, who currently watch porn anonymously, would not want to identify themselves as porn viewers by paying a special fee to have access,” says Virginia Commonwealth University professor and constitutional scholar Matt Pinsker in an email to Playboy. “A decrease in viewership could have devastating consequences for the adult film industry, which is already suffering from the explosion of amateur content. In short, lifting net neutrality would likely be a form of de facto censorship.” 

Long story short, you don’t want your wife seeing that charge pop up on the bank statement. 

https://twitter.com/agschneiderman/status/941025240129441792

The FCC decision is intensely controversial on other levels. Perhaps the most unsettling is this: apparently a vast number of comments made in support of doing away with net neutrality were fake, leading opponents to understandably conclude there’s something super sketchy about the whole thing. 

Porn stars hate this loss of freedom. Watch one of their explainers above about why the disappearance of net neutrality sucks harder than they ever could. Then hope your own internet provider will be cool and act like the FCC never took this form of legal protection away.