Major Advertisers Confront Child-Porn Controversy

The report not only exposes how illegal child porn is distributed online on well-known community sites like Yahoo! Geocities, but also how it is published alongside advertising from major brands, such as Continental Airlines, Chevron and ArtistDirect. As these advertisers pay for "run of network" ad placements appearing across many Yahoo! properties, it happens that the ads often appear alongside pornographic pictures of underage children.

While hosting companies would rather not be put in the position of having to police Internet content, accusations are being levelled that they willingly turn a blind eye to child pornography hosted on their servers as it is profitable.

Many corporations are angered at this state of affairs. Said Chevron spokesperson Bonnie Chaikind, "We didn't even think to ask if our ads were running in unregulated areas. We were never told that appearing on pornographic content was a possibility."

"If we knew that our ad would appear around this content, we would not have done this," said Jeff Rea, ArtistDirect's vice president of marketing. This after Red Herring found an ArtistDirect advertisement featuring Britney Spears opposite explicit pictures of children as young as five years old.

The U.S. attorney general, John Ashcroft, has stated that prosecuting child pornographers is a priority, and that everyone associated with the creation, transmission and distribution of online child pornography could be prosecuted. However, should the U.S. Department of Justice act upon these threats it could mean ordering major Web hosting companies to shut down, which would not only shut down large parts of the Internet, but would also carry potential ramifications for a wide variety of large companies.

According to Red Herring, the child pornography business has revenues of between $200 million and $1 billion a year worldwide, with the money ending up not only in the hands of the pornographers, many operating from Russia, but also in the hands of legitimate businesses such as Web hosting companies, domain name registries, credit card processors and banks, all of whom, depending on the degree of complicity, could find themselves targets of federal law enforcement.