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Also the new 2257 regs indicated that the DOJ may be going after the tube site uploaders. They aren't going to want to leave a massive door like that open. Wonder how many of them uploading stolen content have 2257 docs.
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I wouldn't count on the DOJ to do anything about the tubes anytime this decade.
Folks have talked about tubes and their massive backlinks, the cost of bandwidth, and the illegal content. Here's what I've gathered from doing a bit of research since I started this thread:
Although Google claims to want to go after folks that buy back links for pr and placement I don't think that they really do that. I don't think that reporting anyone for buying links is a good thing. SEO is SEO, if someone finds a way to rise in the rankings, good for them. I do find it odd that Google doesn't look at a site with 300,000 to over 1,500,000 backlinks and not wonder how they got all of the one way links pointing in. Of course, if those links come from surfers posting links to their favorite porn...good for the website, that's what it's all about. However, it seems that it'd be quite easy for Google to determine whether the incoming links were from posts or from other websites that are selling links. I'd imagine that in the not to distant future the sites that sell backlinks will get targeted by Google and lose all of their pr and then the sites that they link to will follow suite. I've seen Google knock SEO tactics like this out, in one fell swoop, on more than one occasion in my 12 years in this business.
IMHO the immediate dilemma for tube sites is more along the lines of converting their traffic into more money than it costs for the bandwidth.
If their major financier, Adult Friend Finder, is unable to pay the tubes as they used to for ads, and MasterCard regulations prohibit folks that advertise on the tube sites (remember the normal advertiser on adult sites is the pay sites but they can't really advertise on the tube sites because the tubes are basically giving away pay site content for free...hence the pay sites don't have much to offer a surfer to join up) from stealing from the surfers that sign up (that's basically what they were doing with the check boxes), then the $$$ coming into the tubes becomes much less. If this happens, and their bandwidth fees stay the same, they could not be able to pay for bandwidth and be forced to shut their sites down.