Arab Internet Users Catch Up With Cyber Porn
April 27 -- Things tend to get hot in the Arab world. There's the weather of course, and the political situation periodically steams up the discourse on the streets. But now the heat seems to have spilled into the annals of Arab cyberworld.
At an Internet summit in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) earlier this week, temperatures rose when a Jordanian-based new media professional told a panel of experts that 80 percent of Internet traffic in the Arab world heads for sex sites.
At the International Summit on Internet and Multimedia in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E., Ramzi El Khoury, a journalist and founder of an Arabic-language Internet portal, suggested that strict controls within the Arab world only serves to make porn sites an even more compelling destination for Arab users.
If El Khoury is to be believed, the Arab world is all set to go searching for porn and Arab Internet users' tastes are not very different from their Western counterparts.
Although absolute figures are hard to come by, everyone knows that in the Western world, particularly the United States, the biggest thing on the Web is pornography. A recent study released by Forrester Research Inc. found that 19 percent of the online population in North America visit adult content Web sites, 77 percent of whom are male.
A Matter of Control
Anti-government information is the obvious boogeyman a number of Middle East and Southeast Asian countries are on the alert for. But for Islamic countries, a far more pervasive threat is what they see as the American-dominated sexy underbelly of the World Wide Web.
But not everyone agrees with El Khoury's estimate of porn site visitors in the Middle East.
"I don't think anyone can vouch for his figures since we don't have the tools to track Web traffic," said Ramzi Zeine, CEO of Arabia.com, a leading pan-Arab portal.
"I do understand the point he's trying to make, though: that the minute you ban something, people will want to go to it. You can't control it."
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