In 2017 porn sites care more about your online freedom than politicians

This is your reminder that Pornhub and YouPorn are currently doing more to defend your rights on the free internet than the Federal Communications Commission.

The pornography industry has been one of net neutrality’s staunchest defenders, going so far as to have a day of loading icons to protest potential rollback in June. Even earlier, in March, several sites switched to HTTPS encryption so as to hide your peculiar browsing habits from the ISPs. At the time, the FCC was voting to roll back restrictions preventing ISPs from selling your browser history.

So that’s the state of the union as of the last gasp of 2017 rings out: PornHub and YouPorn care more about your interests than the FCC does.

Obviously TNW is pro-net neutrality. If you need a primer on what we think of the FCC’s latest decision, my colleague Abhimanyu Ghoshal has written a treatise on the flaws in the FCC’s logic.

ISPs, the ones who stand to benefit from the coming system, have been quick to defend themselves, and it’s AT&T’s defense that rings out most clearly to me at this moment:

Make no doubt, the circulation of this order will bring the ‘sky is falling’ crowd to the fore, and they will foretell a day when websites will be blocked, content censored and internet access controlled by ISP overlords.

We’ll take our place among the “sky is falling” crowd, because nothing about the coming rule changes look good to us. I don’t see how we stand to benefit from the paradigm shift we’re most likely going to get after the vote in December.

At least Pornhub has our back.