Somewhere in a box I have a copy of penthouse from the day discussing the meese commission and the hooha that surrounded that. You can learn a whole bunch about the current situation if you go back and learn from history.
http://eserver.org/cultronix/califia/meese/
or
http://www.porn-report.com/contents.htm (some heavy lifting here... it is the FULL report).
The biggest difference these days is that they are fighting against a much more spread out target, a target that honestly can clibm into europe out of reach of american authorities. Considering that obscenity in the US is defined by "community standards", it will be very interesting to see how they define the "community of the internet". Considering that almost every single sexual fetish in the universe has been online at lease 5 years, my feeling is that the community of the internet has already long since decided to be very tolerant and accepting.
New 2257, obscenity police... it is all steps to make it hard to impossible for "small fry" porn operations to exist. Driving out the mom-and-pop operators, replacing them with a strictly regulated and tightly defined little group of companies that the goverment can crack down on and influence directly.
Too bad for them! The current level of video camera, internet connection, and such allows for even total morons to produce passable porn movies, and to distribute them without any government oversight. Push it underground and the underground will get really, really big...
Plus, pushing it all underground will probably cut down on the "average" porn, and make the more extreme, more likely obscene material to be the major content out there.
WAY TO GO GONZALES!
*sigh*
Alex