Arab Internet Users Catch Up With Cyber Porn

April 27, 2001 -- 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."

But Zeina Azzam Seikaly from the Center of Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University cautions against singling out Arab men when it comes to accessing pornography on the Web. "I don't think Muslim men are any different from Catholic, Jewish or Hindu men or that Arab men are any different from American, French or Indian men," she said. "I'm also suspicious of how data can be manipulated."

Some experts caution against making quick causal connections between controlling access to porn sites and the desire to frequent them. "This is like it was five years ago in the U.S., when everyone said Web users would be visiting porn sites," said Jean Francois Seznec, a professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University. "In reality, it's a more standard 15 to 20 percent of online users who visit porn Web sites."

In the early years of the Internet, the high cost of Internet access was the most effective means of control. But as governments realized the advantages of ushering a wired nation into the next millennium, governments across the Arab world have been issuing price cuts while simultaneously implementing proxies and filters that block access to certain sites.

A Challenge for Hackers

While most Arab governments are aware of the importance of joining the Information Technology revolution, a number of Arabs governments are concerned the Internet threatens to wash up a tide of unwanted and uncensored information on their countries' citizens.

Governmental reaction to the perceived threat varies from country to country in the Arab world. While Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt tend to have ambiguous and lax controls, Gulf nations such as Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. have strict regulations and firewalls that attempt to block access to porn sites.

But firewalls are often seen as a challenge by the hacker community.

Last month, political tensions in the Middle East spilled onto the Internet, when visitors to the official Hamas Web site found themselves at a pay-per-view porn site instead. Hamas reacted quickly, blocking access to the site while computer specialists worked to pre-empt future hack attacks.

Controlling access to larger, well-known porn sites is a far easier proposition. In the U.A.E., for instance, visitors to the Playboy Web site are greeted with a large stop sign informing them the site is on the "Emirates Internet Control List."

In Syria, although President Bashar Assad came to power last June vowing to bring the Internet to every house in the country, by controlling the Syrian Telecommunication Establishment (STE), the sole Internet access provider in the country, Assad's administration manages to closely monitor traffic on the Web.

Although only 1 percent of the Egyptian population uses a computer and of those, only about a third use the Internet, many Egyptian Web sites have succeeded in adapting ancient customs to the new technology.

New dating Web sites offer young Egyptians a chance to meet on the Web with the promise of following the relationship through with a traditional Egyptian marriage.

For single Egyptians, the very prospect of meeting a prospective bride or groom on the Internet is definitely a step in a more risqué direction.