First Virtual: are they being disingenuous?

Frankly, while I oppose censorship, I find First Virtual's invoking
images of censors that "cut off you privates if you have a picture of
a naked woman in your home" a slight bit disengenuous.  I don't think
they're worring about this kind of repression.  I think they're
worring about their wallets.

While the fact that they have a very large proportion of their vendors
selling porn (about 25 out of 150) is no secret (visit their home
page), they are very close-chested about visit ratios and from where
the largest proportion of their revenue comes, and they aren't
mentioning this in their self-righteous mail messages.

And while they might take a stances saying that they aren't
responsible, their vendors are, the fact remains that they make money
and are implicitly pornography vendors.

Right now, First Virtual is enforcing and restricting access to their
porn vendors by requiring one to get a first virtual account, which
implicitly requires a credit card, which presumably requires one to be
an adult.  This doesn't seem like a bad solution.  What's the urgency?

There may be some urgeny in setting up voluntary standards in order to
head off the Senate legislation.  But FV also has plenty to lose $
wise immediately, probably more so than any single party on the globe.

I find their messages rather shrill.

Received on Thursday, 8 June 1995 14:19:03 UTC