Draft 3.5(a), Section 7

7. Vice 3.0

It is a commonplace to note that the internet has changed everything, and this trope would apply to vice regulation, too. Then again, vice has changed the internet: pornography, gambling, prostitution, and prescription pharmaceuticals have been major elements of web commerce almost since the internet’s inception, and have helped to push forward internet technology, including web video quality, anonymity protections, and age verification. But the direction of influence that moves from the internet to vice is, if anything, more profound, and holds the potential to drive future policy regimes.

In the case of pornography and gambling, the internet has allowed “consumption” to take place in the privacy and comfort of one’s home, instead of in a public theatre or casino, say. This privatization of consumption represents a vast expansion in the availability of these vices. Often the existing regulatory structure pre-supposes or enforces a certain level of availability and a specific mode of consumption. Regulations aimed at bricks-and-mortar casinos or strip clubs might not extend to internet gambling or webcam porn, leaving these types of online vice initially unregulated. Simultaneously, the external costs associated with vice consumption can be reduced via private consumption; public nuisance problems or streetwalking in the area of a triple-x theatre do not have obvious parallels with internet porn.

At-home participation also goes a long way to eliminate some of the non-monetary “costs” of consuming vice, such as the potential for embarrassment when seen walking into an adult book store or cinema, or when transacting with the clerks in such establishments. Prescription pharmaceuticals such as Viagra might be purchasable over the internet without an initial in-person consultation with a physician. Payments for internet vice might be shielded from the view of family members, too, through the use of PayPal or Bitcoins. Greater availability and lower costs suggest the possibility of considerable increases in consumption and perhaps compulsive behavior. Surely internet pornography and gambling have led to addictive conduct among many people who were not at much risk of a non-virtual porn or betting addiction; video games and the internet in general have sparked their own digital addictions (though perhaps these have served as a substitute for alcohol consumption or other vices that are less salubrious).

The internet has revolutionized what might be termed the supply sides of pornography and prostitution. Aspiring porn actors now need not travel to southern California; rather, they can produce – and distribute globally – pornography from their own homes. Escorts can advertise on the web, easing the task of making a connection with clients, and also use the internet to verify potential clients’ identities, reputations, and credit cards. Internet-based sex work is by no means a perfectly safe endeavor, but it involves much lower risks than streetwalking, and is perhaps safer still in areas where prostitution itself is legal (Weitzer 2012). Where prostitution is illegal, web publicity not only allows connections to be made, it allows law enforcers to track sellers, too. Nonetheless, the overall impact of the web seems to be, so far, on the side of diminishing the arrest risks for prostitutes (Cunningham and Kendall, 2011).

Along with a degree of anonymity, the web offers the ability to selectively undo that anonymity. Those with an interest in legal, consensual behaviors – behaviors that people might not want to openly disclose to the world – can make good use of the internet, then. People who would like to explore sado-masochistic sexual practices, for instance, can make connections over the internet in a relatively safe manner (Leitzel 2008b). They can learn about S&M, purchase books and equipment, and reveal their own experiences and fantasies. The internet has proved to be a huge boon to poker, as players can easily be brought together via the web nexus, and novice players needn’t fear face-to-face embarrassment from poor play, while honing their skills at low or even zero stakes.

Vice researchers, policymakers, and the public at large also can be educated via the internet. To the extent that it is unfamiliarity that stokes fear and suspicions of immorality, the internet holds the potential to broaden minds and liberalize the attitudes and laws that currently are arrayed against seemingly immoral vices. As always, however, the vice-related internet is doubled-edged, and depictions of odd or alarming behavior by vice participants can go viral on the web – this happened in the US in the case of the drug mephedrone (“bath salts”), which was banned in 2011 – and induce those moral panics that often drive repressive legislation. (Moral panics are not an exclusively digital phenomenon, of course; regulatory action against mephedrone in the UK was stimulated by various mistaken newspaper reports of horrific outcomes for some young people suspected of using the drug (Nutt, 2012).) The intended “selective disclosure” of sexting or social media photos of drinking or drug taking has proven to be insufficiently selective at times, with indiscretions becoming widely publicized and available to almost anyone, including future employers.

Beyond offering much greater availability to vice, the internet eases the access to treatment resources: people can be just as shy about seeking treatment as they are about publicly indulging in vice, so options to contact treatment providers over the internet can be helpful. Web-based casinos can be required to provide links to treatment providers, as well as highlight opportunities to self-exclude or self-limit.

The internet can go beyond reducing information and transaction costs and enhancing privacy; rather, it can facilitate a wholesale transformation in the nature of commercial vice, something akin to how the internet and digitization revolutionized “games”. Prostitutes and their clients, for instance, could be thoroughly vetted for disease, trustworthiness, financial solvency, and safety, even while protecting their anonymity, through internet intermediaries that collect and verify information on STD tests, credit histories, and criminal backgrounds, for instance, and allow both the buyer and seller access to that information before their encounter. (This scenario is developed more fully in Peppet (2013).) The harms associated with prostitution thereby might be greatly diminished. Personalized drugs might be designed and purchased via the web, or fabricated at home from web-acquired directions on 3D printers.

In terms of the robustness approach to vice regulation, the internet, on balance, and for the time being, seems to be helpful. Vice consumption choices are better informed, with the dangers of vices and the effects, many of them unintended and negative, connected with regulations made clearer. Those repressive regulatory regimes that are furthest from meeting the robustness principle, especially drug prohibition, are eased somewhat, and have their harms reduced, by the de facto web-based liberalization (Pepett, 2013; Cunningham and Kendall, 2013). This liberalization might make it still more evident that vice cannot be abolished – at least at any tolerable cost – and illustrate Spinoza’s wisdom, that “It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful.”