Cashing in on porn

There’s as much money to be made from tagging and blocking pornography as there is from making it, if a new wave of entrepreneurs and lobbyists is anything to go by. Milo Yiannopoulos reports.

Advocates from the child protection filtering lobby are profiting from their advancement of filtering and blocking technologies. Some of them even own shares in companies that classify websites, The Kernel can reveal.

As consumers become better educated about the benefits of technology, they are also growing increasingly disturbed by the amount of inappropriate material to be found on the internet. Such fears are bolstered by hysterical and often technologically illiterate news reports in tabloid newspapers.

A lucrative industry is now springing up offering to sanitise the internet for the benefit of young and vulnerable surfers. But critics point out that the techniques advocated by this industry are almost certainly completely unworkable. And there are questions about the motivations of these supposedly high-minded campaigners.

John Carr boasts an impressive array of past and present committee appointments in the areas of child protection and pornography filtering. He is Secretary of the Children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety and its lead spokesperson, regularly cited in the press.

He is also a member of the Executive Board of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS).

Over the past few weeks, rumours have been circulating that Carr has an interest in a San Francisco-based technology start-up that is developing a range of opt-in web filtering products, though he strongly denies holding either shares or options in any company.

He is also non-executive director of online age verification service NetIDme and listed on the company’s management team.

Carr, who once consulted for controversial snooping company Phorm, told The Kernel yesterday: ”I can only imagine that companies that see [the start-up in question] as a competitor are either hallucinating or they are trying to tempt you into writing something which is untrue, maybe in the hope that I’ll sue you.”

UKCCIS failed to respond to questions about whether its board members are obliged to complete a declaration of interest form on appointment. But documents seen by The Kernel suggest that at least three individuals on the Council’s board have serious financial conflicts of interest.

There is no evidence that Carr is one of them, but questions are being asked about how these high-profile lobbyists fund themselves. Although Carr declined to provide a copy of his UKCCIS declaration of interests, The Kernel understands there is at least one pending Freedom of Information request for this document.

Carr is one of a growing number of professional lobbyists and spokespeople for filtering and blocking, techniques widely regarded by internet experts as antithetical to the personality of the web and the intentions of its chief architect, Tim Berners-Lee.

Of course, Carr is not alone in forging a reputation and a lucrative career on the growing public concern about inappropriate material online. Another prominent spokesperson for the filtering lobby, whom The Kernel cannot name for legal reasons, also owns shares in a technology start-up whose products are dedicated to identifying obscene material on the net.

An expert familiar with the internet filtering ecosystem yesterday told The Kernel that some lobbyists bring in “an easy six figures … selling scare stories and technologically unfeasible solutions” to an “ignorant public and scaremongering tabloid press”.

Hiding conflicts of interest that would be outrageous in other walks of life behind “the sanctifying mask of child protection”, these spokespeople are “making a killing”, she said.

Founder fashions

And it isn’t just talking heads cashing in on a zeitgeist of fear.

MetaCert has raised $740,000 to tag offensive content, despite the questionable track record and reputation of its chief executive. The company is taking advantage of the aforesaid trend toward dead-end security products that have a virtuous halo around them.

MetaCert’s directors are Paul Walsh and his wife Sheetal Walsh. The couple left the UK abruptly in 2011 after Walsh’s previous venture, Wubud, which had been invested in by Bebo brother Paul Birch, failed to launch a product.

A dormant company called MetaCert Ltd. in Ireland lists Walsh’s long-time business partner Asheesh Dewan as a director.

Wubud was at the centre of a notorious fiasco in 2009 at Microsoft BizSpark’s Mobile Incubation Week. At the show and tell, Walsh’s team were unable to produce a prototype, blaming Microsoft for supplying “sub-standard foreign developers”, despite the software company spending over £70,000 on software and support for Wubud during the competition.

No other team made such a complaint.

Walsh’s name in particular is the source of amusement to long-time London tech scene observers. He is at the centre of persistent, unseemly whisperings that make his “sudden transformation into the white knight of the internet … sort of mind-blowing”, according to one female former business associate.

Sand Hill Road venture capital firm Greylock Partners told The Kernel last week that it has seen “dozens upon dozens” of filtering and blocking start-ups pitching for funding over the past twelve months with many being funded “almost as if their mission was deserving enough of a Series A [funding round] on its own”.

Most of these start-ups are operating in “stealth mode”, an expression that means the company does not publicise its products, hoping to be silently and swiftly acquired by ISPs or content companies anxious to be seen to take consumer concerns about pornography seriously.

It remains to be seen whether politicians can be persuaded into legislating start-ups like MetaCert into profitability by making their products mandatory by those advising such companies. What’s clear is that there is already a fortune to be made as a start-up founder or talking head, if you can only overlook the small problem of hopeless technical implausibility inherent to such systems.

Editor’s Note: The original title of this article was “The new porn barons”.

A previous version of the article assigned to the directors and management team “questionable track records and reputations”. We would like to clarify that this statement was intended to apply only to Mr Walsh. We apologise to the other directors and employees of MetaCert for the editing error.  

We previously cited MetaCert Ltd. as the company behind MetaCert when of course it is MetaCert Inc.

Additionally, the final paragraph was reworded to make it clear that MetaCert is not “strong-arming” politicians into mandating its products.