As the stone-faced senators watched, Exon held up a blue binder that, he warned, was filled with the sort of “perverted pornography” that was “just a few clicks away” online. “I cannot and would not show these pictures to the Senate, I would not want our cameras to pick them up,” he said, but “I hope that all of my colleagues, if they are interested, will come by my desk and take a look at this disgusting material.”
They were interested.
One by one, they flipped through the pages of “grotesque stuff,” as Coats put it, that innovation fostered. He cited figures—albeit dubious—from a study that found more than 450,000 pornographic images online that had been accessed approximately 6.4 million times the previous year. The main source had been the free newsgroups—alt.sex, alt.bestiality—and so on, that remained a Wild West of flesh and filth. “With old Internet technology, retrieving and viewing any graphic image on a PC at home could be laborious,” Coats explained, forebodingly. “New Internet technology, like browsers for the Web, makes all this easier.”
As urgent as the situation seemed to the senators, however, such concerns over pornography and emerging technology were far from new. John Tierney, a fellow at Columbia University who studied the cultural impact of technology, traced what he called the “erotic technological impulse” back at least 27,000 years—among the first clay-fired figures uncovered from that time were women with large breasts and behinds. “Sometimes the erotic has been a force driving technological innovation,” Tierney wrote in The New York Times in 1994, “virtually always, from Stone Age sculpture to computer bulletin boards, it has been one of the first uses for a new medium.”
Such depictions emerged, predictably, with every new technological advent. With cave art, there came sketches of reclining female nudes on walls of the La Magdelaine caves from 15,000 BC. When Sumerians discovered how to write cuneiform on clay tablets, they filled them with sonnets to vulvas. Among the early books printed on a Gutenberg press was a sixteenth-century collection of sex positions based on the sonnets of the man considered the first pornographer, Aretino—a book banned by the pope.
Each new medium followed a similar pattern of innovation, porn, and outrage. One of the first films shown commercially was the The Kiss in 1900, distributed by Thomas Edison and depicting eighteen seconds of a couple nuzzling. “The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting,” one critic wrote, while Edison celebrated how the film “brings down the house every time.” The first erotic film, a striptease Le Coucher de la Mariée, released in 1896, was also heating up audiences.
By the late 1950s, the advent of 8mm film put the power of porn in anyone’s hands—and launched the modern porn industry. When videocassette recorders entered the homes twenty years later, more than 75 percent of the tapes sold were porn. It became widely accepted that Sony’s decision to ban porn from its competing Betamax format doomed it to oblivion. More recently, the breaking apart of the Bell phone system in 1984 spawned the explosion in 900 phone sex numbers. And so it was no surprise that the dawn of the internet was giving rise to the same kind of innovation, demand, and outrage that had been going on for eons.
The furor over internet pornography had started with the publication of a study, “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway,” in The Georgetown Law Journal. The authoritative-sounding study, written by a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate, Marty Rimm, claimed to be “a Survey of 917,410 Images, Description, Short Stories and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2000 Cities in Forty Countries, Provinces and Territories.” Rimm asserted that 80 percent of images on newsgroups, the primary repository of pictures online, were porn.
The shocking figure caught the attention of Time magazine, which published a cover story on July 3, 1995, just in time for holiday readers, announcing the soon-to-be released findings. The cover photo showed a young boy at a computer keyboard, bathed in blue light, eyes wide, mouth opened in horror. “CYBERPORN,” the cover line screamed, “a new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” As the writer put it in the piece, “If you think things are crazy now, though, wait until the politicians get hold of a report coming out this week.”
He was right. Despite the outcry of civil libertarians and skeptics (“Rimm’s implication that he might be able to determine ‘the percentage of all images available on the Usenet that are pornographic on any given day’ was sheer fantasy,” as Mike Godwin wrote in HotWired), Rimm’s study became the basis of the Communications Decency Act proposal. And, as Exon put it during the Senate gathering, their responsibility was clear. Despite objections over the restrictions on free speech, the CDA would target the burgeoning purveyors of porn online, who would now face up to two years in prison for posting obscene material that could be accessed by anyone under age eighteen. When the vote was taken, the answer was overwhelming: the Senate, and later the House, approved the CDA.
By summer, however, the basis of the law had been resoundingly discredited. Rimm’s paper, savaged by critics, was found to have been published without peer review—feeding conspiracy theories that it was all the machinations of anti-porn activists. The New York Times dismissed the study as “a rip-snorter,” filled with “misleading analysis, ambiguous definitions and unsupported conclusions.” Attacked by internet trolls, Rimm went into hiding. But his work, and the senators’, was done.
On February 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act into law. “Today,” he said, “with the stroke of a pen, our laws will catch up with the future.” For Exon and the others, it couldn’t have come soon enough. “If nothing is done now,” as he had urged his colleagues during the hearing, “the pornographers may become the primary beneficiary of the information revolution.”
* * *
One day in Boca Raton, Florida, in May 1996, Jordan Levinson, the owner of AIS Marketing, a start-up that brokered ads for adult websites, received a call from a man who wanted to benefit from the burgeoning underworld of the information revolution: Stephen Cohen.
Levinson, who had worked with his father running a phone sex company, had encountered plenty of wannabe pornographers in his day, and sensed that, as he later put it, Cohen “didn’t seem too knowledgeable of the industry.” But Cohen had something more valuable: the one domain that anybody with a computer and a modem would type if they were looking for porn, www.sex.com. So he readily struck a deal to buy, sell, and collect ads for what Cohen promised, just as he had promised the board members at Sporting House, would be the single greatest destination for “sucking and fucking” online.
Despite the federal regulation, there was simply no way to stop the flood of porn online, let alone determine or enforce the age of consumers. And now more people than ever were online. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of homes with computers was skyrocketing—approaching 36 percent of U.S. households, up from 22.8 percent in 1993, and just 8 percent in 1984. One in five Americans were now using the internet.
Of these, most reported using it for email or, as the Census Bureau catalogued it, “finding government, business, health, or education information,” though anyone online at the time knew exactly what they were really seeking—just as generations had on every new medium before them. Even better, as Cohen learned, they were willing to pay for porn. When he launched Sex.com as a business in the spring of 1996, an underworld of outlaws, innovators, and entrepreneurs was racing to cash in. But first they had to do what no one had reliably done before: figure out how to make money online.
While Cohen might sell membership subscriptions to his site—charging visitors a monthly fee to access photos, videos, and so on—as Levinson explained, the trick was getting surfers to click a banner ad, the interactive billboards of the information superhighway, and visit a site. A banner ad on one page could be c
licked and take a visitor to the other. The value for the advertisers came two ways: in “impressions,” meaning the number of times the banners loaded up for visitors to see, and “clicks,” the number of times someone clicked on the ad, which would take him to their site. “They pay for the advertising,” as Levinson put it, “they pay for their banner spot to be there.” Levinson would be his ad guy—buying, selling, and collecting money, all for a 15 percent cut. How much could Cohen get? With a site like Sex.com, Levinson thought, upward of $30,000 per ad.
Cohen didn’t even need to make porn, he realized, to make money. He could just make money by selling ads on his site and cashing in on the traffic he sent to others. Cohen took one look at his blank webpage, and knew exactly what he wanted to do: sell as many banner ads as possible, and rake it in. All he needed to do was get the word out to the nascent pornographers online that he was open for business. And the place to do this was Vegas.
The burgeoning moguls and fans of internet porn gathered there for their annual convention, AdultDex, which coincided with Comdex, the annual computer trade show that drew 200,000 technology enthusiasts to town. Porn had long been a welcome draw at electronics shows since fueling the VCR boom in the 1980s. But times were changing. Two years earlier, AdultDex exhibitors got banned from Comdex for showing too much nudity—both on CD-ROMs and the scantily clad porn stars—in their booth (when the porn companies wouldn’t leave, the Comdex organizers had to literally unplug their electricity to get them out the door). “Their stuff is obscene and we don’t need them,” a Comdex spokeswoman told the Las Vegas Sun after the convention in 1995, and if that meant losing the $500,000 in booth rental revenue, so be it.
But to the relief of the Comdex attendees, AdultDex refused to go for good. In November 1996, instead, they simply moved their computers and dominatrixes across the street to the Sahara, the Moroccan-themed hotel casino made famous in the 1950s by the Rat Pack. Cohen would be among the throngs streaming in and out of the porte-cochère entrance under the flashing lights of the yellow-domed minaret.
Across the smoke-filled casino floor, these were his people: the quick-talking moguls with fat wallets and chunky cell phones, the slinky adult actresses and actors at the slots, the wide-eyed Comdex attendees from Iowa with their laminate tags deftly flipped to hide their names. On the small exhibit floor, they showed off their software titles on smudgy screens: The Dollhouse, Men in Motion, Virgins 2. In another booth, a company was demonstrating Showgirls Live, a live video feed, albeit painfully slow, that showed a stripper disrobing on-screen—an experience that could be had for $5 a minute. Jenna Jameson, a doe-eyed buxom blonde and the industry’s most popular adult star, preened for photos as she extolled the wonders of her electronic mail. “It’s so much easier than fan mail,” she told a reporter from CNN, “let me tell you.”
For Cohen, it was like being back at The Club in Orange County—the sex, the desire, the want, the money to be made, and the chance for him to be king. And he would be king of it all, he determined, because he had the most desired clubhouse online of all, the one that would be the first stop for the Iowans and their ilk online. He had Sex.com, and they would bow to him. Among those who were seeking Cohen out was Yishai Hibari, an Israeli musician turned adult webmaster who wanted to take out ads on the site. Word was that Cohen was doing three times the traffic. Among the porn stars in bikinis and guys with greased-back hair, he saw what he recalled to be “a funny chubby guy with an important look on his face,” walking a small white Chihuahua with a red ribbon around its neck. Cohen was always chatty, and chummy, friends never saw him in a bad mood. “I heard you own Sex.com,” Hibari told him.
“I don’t know,” Cohen replied, vaguely.
Hibari couldn’t understand why he was being so circumspect. “Everything was unclear,” he later recalled. But that, he learned, was Cohen’s way, a tactic, however strange, for keeping people on edge and maintaining leverage. A few weeks later, Cohen relented—instructing Hibari to contact Levinson about buying precious space on his site—to the tune of $50,000 a banner. Sex.com wasn’t pretty, Hibari could see, but Cohen’s barebones use of it as a “banner farm” was a business coup. “It was genius,” he said. Kevin Blatt, a marketing executive for adult sites, thought Cohen was, in his own way, visionary: someone who saw the value of the traffic, and realized the best way to cash in was by cramming as many possible banners on his site as he could.
It didn’t take long for the success to go to Cohen’s head. He became known for wandering porn shows with a smug smile, and a polo shirt embroidered with the Sex.com logo. Even among the rulers of the Wild Porn West online, he soon gained an unseemly reputation. Just as he had done for years, he put his amateur trademark attorney scam to use by suing anyone, and everyone, who had the word sex in a domain name. Serge Birbair, the owner of sexia.com, was among those who, as he put it, was “harassed by Stephen Cohen.” When hit with Cohen’s lawsuit, he didn’t have the money to fight back against the traffic king—and chose instead to relent, and hand over sexia.com to Cohen. “It cost me money to defend myself, and it cost me a lot of grief,” as one pornmaster put it after caving in. “Eventually, I decided it ain’t worth the fight.”
Cohen reveled in the power. No one could stop him with Sex.com on his side—not even the guy who claimed to own it. One day, Cohen received a certified letter from Kremen’s attorney, demanding he not only cease and desist using Sex.com, but send the money he’d earned from the site Kremen’s way. Cohen had one response. Kremen could go fuck himself. He’d been selling sucking and fucking online since the 1980s, and Sex.com was rightfully his. As he later told Kremen’s attorney, “If anybody stole it, it was Gary Kremen stealing it from me.”
* * *
“Welcome to Sex.com! THIS IS A REALITY CHECK! Are you sure that you want to PROCEED to view explicit, sexually oriented materials? Further, Are you sure that you are over 18 years old, or of the legal age in your jurisdiction to view explicit, sexually oriented materials? (IF you do not know or are unsure, PLEASE now EXIT and contact an attorney in your jurisdiction for advice.)”
Kremen, hunched and bitter, fumed at his computer reading these words on the homepage of Sex.com. This is my home, my domain! he thought. Cohen has no right to it! Looking at it now felt like seeing someone had moved into his house and was sleeping with his girlfriend, if only he had one. It felt like the same old story, someone one-upping him, shaming him in the eyes of the world. He grabbed his mouse, and scrolled down the page like he was dragging nails down a chalkboard, scrolled by another warning. “SEX and SEXUAL ACTIVITY,” it read, indiscriminately capitalized and misspelled like a ransom note, “including but not limited to NUDE MEN and WOMEN, SEXUAL PICTURES and SEXUAL ACTS, SWINGING and its lifestyle, NUDITY and its lifestyle, Gays, Lesibans [sic], Bi-Sexual Ladies, and light B&D. . . . EXIT by clicking the EXIT button below.”
Past the EXIT button he scrolled, down, down until he came to the twenty-six-point all-capped bold font words like he was punching himself in the gut: “ENTER Sex.com!” And he clicked. Kremen watched the next page slowly load down his screen: sluggish from the billboards of banner ads, one after the other, crammed over every available pixel. It felt like walking down 42nd Street and being assaulted by the porn marquees in 1977.
“Hardcore Sex” read one. “Come on in to our XXX Gallery” read another. One was a strip showing two naked guys sitting on the edge of a pool next to two nude women. There were enticements bordering a long column of links that read ENTER. “How to enjoy anal sex with your lover! the proper way!” ENTER. “A Ladies view on how to EAT PUSSY! the proper way!” ENTER. “DO IT! JUST CLICK HERE!” And then, at the bottom of the page, a contact email for any questions, Kremen read: [email protected].
Boom, there it was: the name, [email protected], Stephen Michael Cohen. Kremen rolled the name around in his mind, letting it embed, the tendrils of the enemy slithering into his brain’s sulcus. Stephen Michael Cohen. The thief. The destroyer. He had no idea w
hether Cohen was actually making money from the site, but it didn’t matter. There was principle. The man had stolen what was his. He had gotten screwed out of Match, he wasn’t about to get fucked out of Sex.com.
Problem was, he was broke. Despite the payoffs of some investments, he needed more cash if he was going to file suit. While Kremen busied himself with new investments and consulting work, he hired a young attorney, Sheri Falco, to navigate the uncharted waters of a potential lawsuit. Falco, an intellectual property attorney, found Kremen doing a million things, as usual, in his office—starting an incubator, making calls, surfing the net. It didn’t take long poking around for her to find out that Cohen was on a lawsuit tear of his own, riding on the back of the trademark protection he filed. She hit back, filing a trademark opposition to put his on hold.
Going on the public record against Cohen had another unintended effect. It got the attention of the many enemies he was making in the online porn industry. And, before long, Falco got a call from the two biggest, and most powerful, ones of all, Ron “Fantasy Man” Levi and Seth Warshavsky, who had an urgent message for Kremen. They wanted to help him take Cohen out.
They were good friends to have. Fantasy Man was considered by many to be the godfather of the online porn business. A dark-haired, imposing strongman, he lived in a ten-thousand-square-foot California mansion. Fantasy Man had been hustling since learning to shoot pool from the basis of the movie The Hustler himself, Fast Eddie, when he was just fourteen. With a knack for business and a passion for technology, Fantasy Man made his first fortune in audiotext, or phone sex, and parlayed that into the first large network of adult sites on the internet, Cybererotica.
The Players Ball Page 9