Episode 4: Playboy vs. Rusty and Edie

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Right.

Before we start, we're two Financial Times journalists trying to work out who rules the porn industry.

So this show has adult themes.

I want to take you to a suburban shopping plaza in Ohio.

It's 1993.

We're in the middle of America's rust belt.

There's a two-pay store, a place selling furniture, and tucked in a corner, a little company for interactive computer services.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but if the internet has roots, they stretch to here, to this modest shopping center in Youngstown, Ohio.

to that corner business.

Every social media website you visit today, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, these platforms are able to operate in part thanks to them, a family-run I.T.

business.

A family-run IT business with what was possibly the biggest stash of digital porn in America.

Today's power dynamics in porn came from here.

Straight from that family to the most powerful pornographers of the 21st century, the people we've been talking about on this show.

And you know, we told you in previous episodes that the masters of the adult tube sites were able to get away with making money from other people's content?

The answer to how lies here, in the choices of an Ohio family back in the 90s.

This family, the Hardenbergs, define what it means to moderate content in cyberspace and what happens when you go too far.

My name is Russell Francis Hardenberg IV and I'm a sales manager at a car dealership.

Russ is one of two sons who worked at the IT business back in the day.

When I first called him and said I was a journalist, he slammed the phone down.

I'm so pleased I tried again.

After some apologetic mumbling, I said to Russ, I want to hear how your family changed the history of the internet.

And after a pause, he replied, Okay,

call me after work.

The internet was so new that there was some question whether you took a book and converted it to text.

Were the copyright laws still would that apply to that?

It was just the Wild West at first.

And that's the difference Russ and his family made.

Their mistakes helped lay the ground rules for our online world.

Who owns digital media?

Who has a right to share it, and most importantly, how the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world can run online platforms and stay off the hook, even when illegal content is being shared on their sites?

I'm Patricia Nilsson.

I'm Alex Barker.

From Pushkin Industries and the Financial Times, this is Hot Money.

Act one: A Shared World

Later in this episode, Russ and his stepbrother will tell their family story, pretty much for the first time.

It's the story that created the ground rules for the modern porn industry.

But before then, we want to take you further back in history to the 1980s,

the moment that online porn first came into being.

Let's meet one of the world's first digital pornographers.

His name is Dan Lewis.

So, around

1980, I bought my first personal computer.

It was a RadioShack TRS-80 Model 1.

It was pretty exciting at the time.

Your storage device was a cassette tape recorder.

The TRS-80, the biggest name in little computers.

Only at RadioShack.

A dandy company.

As far as we can work out, Dan wasn't just one of the first online pornographers.

He was possibly the first one to actually turn a profit from it.

It was from 1994.

But somehow, it worked.

You could dial up bulletin boards and exchange messages with people and you know find out

some technical information.

Now you might have heard of ARPANET and Usenet, the early ways that academics and military types communicated online.

Bulletin boards used a similar technology but they were for the private world not just public institutions.

Anybody could use them.

Dan's computer was in his bedroom in Queens.

The equipment wasn't cheap, and in Dan's case, no university or government was paying the bills.

He would pick up the chunky telephone handset and plug it into an even bigger box, the modem.

Through the modem, he would then dial another computer in some far-off place, the bulletin board system, or BBS.

It was a shared world.

Games, basic software, conspiracy theories, bad jokes.

If you knew which board to dial up, and you could master the clunky tech, it was all there

and young dan he was in his early 20s then he got more and more obsessed he was dialing up at 11 o'clock at night to keep his meteoric phone bills down he was broke and barely scraping together money for rent

so i started trying to think about is there a way i could leverage this and supplement my income.

What other kinds of BBS-related services might people pay for?

And decided that, you know what, the only thing people will pay for is sex.

People are horny.

People are purian.

People want to see images of other naked people, or they want to see them engage in activities that they can't try now or want to try or have a try.

It's just human nature.

Back in 1984, a bulletin board interface just had text, bright neon green text.

But you could download simple images, games, that kind of stuff.

Dan's idea was to specialize.

He wanted to launch a BBS dedicated to adult stuff, an erotic platform for the uninhibited.

The calls started rolling in.

With hindsight, the technology was laughably basic.

Dan's system, ILNet, was running at 1,200 bits per second.

Not kilobits, not megabits, just bits.

So how did it work?

Well, you'd sit down at your computer.

So you'd go to your dialing list.

Okay, which BBS do I want to call?

All right, let's call this one.

You click on it, and you'll hear ProCom dialing the modem.

Then it'll ring,

and the

modem will answer.

If you haven't heard what a modem sounds like, it sounds a little bit like a fax tone.

And you're connected.

so you get a welcome screen and then you might get a list of subcategories of files it's okay so you click on the adults section and then you might get another sub menu of women men women and men and you pick what you want and it'll download now the fun begins bing bing bing bing bing and it ends up on your computer then you get to look at your picture.

Isn't that easy?

You had to be patient.

That bing, bing, bing took minutes, not seconds.

But for porn, people were willing to wait.

And they would pay for it.

At first, Dan charged $10 to subscribers.

Then it went to $45 a year.

The checks were being mailed to him in the post.

It didn't take long until Dan was making as much from his adult side as he was from his day job.

I mean, it was tremendous.

Those were the best years.

Those were absolutely the best years.

You know what's really striking about that time?

Pioneers like Dan were, on a tiny scale, revealing what was about to hit us all.

Dirty pictures, software, even the written word.

If digital goods could be copied, they would be copied non-stop and shared far and wide.

And the law?

Well...

As we'll tell you in a bit, it hadn't caught up yet.

In this legal no-man's land, Dan could become a pornographer of sorts, all from his bedroom in Queens, without ever having taken a photo or set foot on a porn set.

Even in the age of bulletin boards, people were beginning to realize the implications.

Dan's operation was relatively modest, just a few telephone lines.

He kept his head down.

But some other operators were not so shy.

Operators like Rusty and Edie Hardenberg.

Rusty and Edie was really big and they had, I don't even know how many phone lines they had and obviously invested a lot of money and their objective clearly was to make their living off this completely.

Rusty and Edie's bulletin board veterans talk of them with a wistful air.

And let me give you a clue.

Their office was in Youngstown, Ohio, in a little strip mall next to a two-pay stall.

Rusty and Edie were the father and stepmother of Russ, the guy we heard from earlier in the show.

They were the family who laid the rules for the way the internet works today.

So take a look at this advert I found for Rusty and Eadies from a magazine in the early 90s.

I'm looking at two owls.

They're snuggled up wing to wing.

There's some text here.

It says, says,

We are the friendliest BBS in the world.

Our name says it all.

Edie and I are a couple of burnouts from the 1960s.

We didn't like rules then, and we don't now.

Come on in and relax.

You'll be among friends.

It's great copy, isn't it?

It's fantastic.

You know, this was the Rusty and Edie brand.

It was great marketing.

It worked.

I mean, they were the kind of Ben and Jerrys of 1980s home computing.

You reach their bulletin board and there was in big green letters, first rule, have fun.

Second rule, no more rules.

Wild.

And exactly.

And, you know, they

would not have thought of themselves as pornographers, not for a second.

But almost by accident, they helped define what porn would become in an online age.

So did you manage to speak to them?

Rusty passed a few years ago.

I'd have loved to have spoken to him.

But I did reach Edie and we had an amazing conversation.

But talking about Rusty and Edie's, it just brought back too many memories for her.

So

she didn't want to talk on tape.

And instead, she put me in touch with her son, Sean McFarland.

And he's an army vet.

He runs a chain of convenience stores.

And we spoke to him from a garage that looked more like an an aircraft hangar.

Have you got a helicopter?

Just a little one, yeah.

Yeah, that's all I did in the Army.

So my son and I like to fly around, go have a burger and a pot.

Sean didn't always run convenience stores and zip around in a helicopter.

Growing up, he helped his family run their business.

I built the computers and I networked them, made them talk to each other.

He remembers his stepfather Rusty as a man of outsized passions.

Any hobby would become industry.

Their house would fill with cigars or fish tanks, there were 15 at one point, or big bulky computers, dozens of them.

Rusty actually wasn't an old burned-out hippie.

He was a retired insurance manager and a lifelong libertarian.

He hated being told what to do.

not just by governments, but by anyone, frankly.

So when he started visiting bulletin boards, boards, you can guess what happened next.

So he goes, why don't I start my own with no roles?

So he wanted, no, no roles, a free-for-all, do whatever you want to do.

He wasn't the only one.

A lot of bulletin board folks were making up rules on the go.

Nobody really knew who owned a digital copy of a physical image or a piece of text.

A lot of them didn't care.

Now Russ, the Hardenburgh son who I talked to at the beginning of the show, the one who put the phone down on me, Russ was helping his father Rusty on the software side and handling the fallout from having no rules.

When did adult material start?

Right from the get-go.

So at first it was just

crany scanned photographs.

And then they came out with short little GIFs, which were 30-second mini-movies.

Did Russ have any qualms about having adult content on the system?

Not really.

I mean, it's a libertarian, you know, we're not hurting anybody.

They're all adults.

Some came for the games, sex chat, and dating.

Edie told us that a few people got married after meeting in their forums.

But for others, well,

Rusty and Edie amassed one of the world's biggest collections of digital porn.

By 1993, Rusty and Edie had had hosted roughly three and a half million calls in total, around 4,000 on any given day.

Calls came in from all over the world, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Japan.

And as the business grew, Rusty and Eady had to find space for dozens of computers.

First, the equipment filled the bedroom of Rusty's two-room apartment, then the hall, then the entire basement.

of their new home.

The servers produced so much heat, Rusty installed a four-ton air conditioner.

And it was still like a sauna.

We had to work even in the winter in shorts and a t-shirt.

It was just hot.

I mean, he was a good businessman.

I mean, did he make a lot of money out of this?

Oh, yeah, he did very well.

Those overheated servers hosted around 19 gigabytes of data.

These days you carry 10 times that data in your pocket.

But back then, this was like Aladdin's cave.

It was getting attention.

Some commercial software makers got upset, as did some porn barons, and then there was the FBI.

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With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

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Learn more at supermobile.com.

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where you can see the sky.

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Act 2.

The dangers of moderation.

So far, the Rusty and Eady story is a sort of libertarian dream.

An entrepreneurial family creates an online space with no rules and builds it into a successful family business.

Now we come to the part of the story where the government strikes back.

It's a moment so dramatic that even three decades later, Edie couldn't bear to talk about it.

The night of the raid, it was my sister's wedding day.

And I think they planned it that way so we wouldn't be home.

We were all at the reception and my stepbrother Sean had to go back to the house to get something.

I was coming home with my girlfriend.

I like pulling the drive and I go, whoa, what's all these cars doing here?

And then I walked up to the garage and a bunch of guys with FBI jackets on came and asked me who I was.

They kicked the door in and they came in all different directions.

It was gigantic.

They had guns and they seized everything.

They took every computer, every server, everything out of the house.

They took all our records, everything we had.

They took it all.

My father was terrified.

The warrant alleged they had illegally distributed software without permission of the copyright owners.

But there was more to it than that.

By the early 90s, Congress and the FBI had woken up to the digital economy.

The press was raising alarm about cyber porn.

The FBI wanted to set some boundaries.

The government seized the business just because

they wanted to look around and see if we were doing anything wrong.

For two and a half years, they took a man's business, all his hardware.

You can probably tell from Russ's voice, the memories are still raw for the family.

It's the reason Edie wouldn't speak to us.

Just thinking back to that day gave her sleepless nights.

It was a low point in her life, too.

I mean, they literally thought they were going to prison.

And I mean, I don't care how much money you have.

You can't fight Uncle Sam.

He's got endless money.

Somehow, Rusty and Edie's bulletin board got back online after the FBI swooped.

They had backups, they bought new computers, and they had the shopping plaza office.

The thing is, there was a second punch.

Another crisis for the family.

One that actually helped create the internet we have today.

It came a few months after the raid.

A lawsuit straight from Hugh Hefner's mansion.

The Playboy founder had realized that his pictures were being shared online.

digital copies, and he wasn't being paid.

So, the Hef decided to fight back.

He sent a female staffer on an undercover mission.

She signed up to Rusty's bulletin board under a fake name, Bob Campbell.

And don't we love fake names on this podcast?

Her mission?

To hunt down copied Playboy pics.

You gotta remember, we had maybe 100 to 200,000 images on our servers.

And I think they found five.

Do you remember which pictures they were?

They said a bo Derrick.

Playboy actually presented around 20 images to the court, but it was still a tiny fraction of the pictures available.

I like to think they were all of Bo Derek.

She was the actress from the movie 10, cast in the role of the perfect woman.

Dudley Moore dreamed of her bouncing towards him on a beach.

Now, even before the lawsuit, Rusty had a hunch Playboy, in particular, would come for him someday.

So he made his son Russ screen every uploaded image.

image.

He was a gatekeeper, one of the first online moderators.

And he told him to keep a particular eye out for Playboy images.

Rusty even commissioned software to find Playboy pics and take them down.

But the pictures of Bo Derek,

they somehow slipped through.

Rusty's case settled.

His insurance company covered the settlement amount.

But this case...

was remembered for something else.

They don't know with digitalized information.

Does the copyright still stand for printed information?

That was a gray area.

But the Playboy ruling kind of started the, if it's digitalized, it's still under copyright rule.

The judge ruled against Rusty precisely because he had asked his son to moderate the uploads.

By being responsible, by screening every file, Rusty became liable.

Suddenly, he was a publisher, not just a bulletin board.

The thing Rusty did to protect the family business actually left them exposed.

We didn't think that we would lose because the one thing my father was against was having any pictures of Playboy on our BBS.

That was specifically

tried for years

to keep anything that had to do with Playboy off of our BBS.

That's the

funny thing about it.

Anyway, I guess it's funny, but we thought we had done our due diligence, but evidently the courts thought differently.

The moderation was their downfall.

If Rusty hadn't checked a thing, the people uploading Boderic pictures, they would have been on the hook to Playboy, not Rusty.

This became an important ruling for digital media.

Who owns it?

Who has a right to share it?

Most importantly, can the person running the platform be held liable?

When A ⁇ M Records and half the US music industry sued the file-sharing site Napster in 2000, lawyers in that courtroom were citing Playboy vs.

Russ Hardenberg, the case against Rusty and Edie.

It's so strange to think that the road rules of the internet were partly laid down in a hot basement in suburban Ohio, a hot basement stacked full of computers, tangled cables, and grainy gifts of porn.

These road rules would be one hell of an important lesson for the next generation of internet entrepreneurs, for Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.

But also online pornographers like Fabian Tillman and Bernd Bergmeyer.

If it was not for Rusty and Eady, Pornhub might be run very differently.

You can hear the same debate today.

You might have heard of big tech's favorite laws, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Together, they effectively give immunity to platforms like Google or Facebook.

It is a tiny law that's had a huge impact on the internet as we know it.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle want to change the way the law works, affecting how content is moderated online.

Companies aren't liable for what people say or share on their sites, even if it is illegal.

Some critics of the law say that it leaves social media free to ignore lies, hoaxes, and slander that can wreck the lives of innocent people.

And the Playboy case against Rustine Eady,

It paved the way for that protection.

On screening and moderation, it set the legal standard for online media.

The big lesson?

Don't screen content too rigorously.

It leaves you on the hook.

Just deal with the complaints.

Rusty's family still feels pretty sore.

They were raided, dragged through the courts, punished for moderating.

The whole FBI ordeal lasted two years without a charge being filed.

And all those boderic pictures?

You can find them on countless sites these days.

So did it work?

Basically, you can get right now everything we had on there.

If you log in a major search engine and hit image, you can get the same thing now.

Now are they suing them?

The BBS era didn't last for long.

By 1995, it had been pretty much blown away by the popularity of AOL and the World Wide Web.

That opened a truly libertine era for the internet.

And porn.

The Great Digital Awakening.

After the break, we'll meet one of its stars.

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With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

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Act 3.

A Web of Wonder

Meet Madeline Altman.

She's talking from her home in Massachusetts, designed by the founder of the Bauhaus movement.

Out of the window, I can see fields rolling into the distance.

It's a picture of New England tranquility.

Was it very intimate?

Doing it, I've,

I mean, oh my god, god, I came sometimes.

I came like five, six times a day.

I swear.

God, Alex, it was so hot.

I mean, come on.

You're in a private booth, and the guys are telling you how gorgeous they are and how sexy you are.

And you're like, great,

I'm loving this, you know.

Madeline is in her late 50s.

She has two master's degrees.

She speaks five languages.

And back in 1995, she was one of the first people to create, host, and run a live video conferencing site.

It just happens she did it while performing nude.

Live video is something many of us use every day for work.

It's one of the wonders of the internet.

Madeline's business was the not safe for work kind.

Today they're called cam sites and they're a great money spinner for porn.

Live video is an experience that can't be copied and shared.

Madeline stands out because she was doing this in 1995.

The World Wide Web had launched, but none of the things we take for granted online were there.

Search engines, video streaming, online payments.

Everything was an experiment.

Nobody had worked out what the internet was for or how it could be turned into serious money.

In other words, nobody ruled cyberspace.

And this is where porn had its moment.

When people like Madeline became the first colonizers of this online world.

To understand Madeline's journey, you have to start with a television series, Madeline's Variety TV, MVTV.

We have a hot show for you tonight.

It's breast maintenance day.

Does a bra a day help the sag go away?

You know, I mean, should you.

I read once when I was young that you should wear a bra every day.

Is this true?

Or that's what you told me the other day, right?

What do you think about this?

Do you wear a bra now?

Not every day.

Inspired by anarchists, it aired in San Francisco on the Community Access channel in the late 80s.

MVTV is really, really sexy, right?

Because San Francisco is really, really sexy.

So we get really wild, you know, like putting wrestling, lesbians having sex on the American flag and you know when you're immersed in this world San Francisco in the late 80s and early 90s was a heavily sexualized culture and it became super normalized right the show picked up a cold following and earned Madeline a scholarship to NYU so she moved east and enrolled in one of the hippest tech programs around you had to code whatever was on the internet with HTML code.

So I had to learn that.

You have to be really precise, very very patient.

I'm like a hyperactive, crazy wild producer chick.

I am not someone who's going to sit there and make sure every dot in its place.

It drove me mad.

But more than anything, the program was about big brash ideas.

And one day, one of those ideas hit Madeline like the clap of a Whitney Houston solo.

She was walking in New York's East Village and thinking back to some old guests on her TV show.

I do remember like this whole thing with talking to strippers and about how they loved their job and it was great, but coming back and forth from the clubs, it was so dangerous.

And I knew a stripper who had gotten attacked.

I was walking down Second Avenue and I'm like, oh my God, just have them do it online.

This is going to be like scooping money out of just puddles everywhere.

This is going to make me so rich.

And I'm so altruistic.

I get to save strippers.

I'm just so awesome.

Have them do it online.

You can just picture her in that street, stopping dead in her tracks, live video streaming.

Madeline had just stumbled on the idea that, 25 years later, made our pandemic Zoom calls possible.

It was a little milestone in tech, Madeline's light bulb moment.

Although there were, admittedly, just a few small issues with making it a reality.

There was no technology, there was no streaming video, nobody was charging anything online.

But she got to work, and soon a site called Babes for You was born.

Madeline put what money she had into it and

there wasn't much.

She hired a cheap office above a loud Mexican joint playing the macarena all night long.

She found her babes who had mainly been working as trippers and in her own words she hired and fired coders like Spinal Tapwent Through Drummers.

They first went live that year.

You downloaded some software via an 0800 number and with that you could play live video.

You could chat too, although only by keyboard.

Set aside the nudity for a moment.

This was a new frontier in online communication, but it was painfully slow.

One of the babes didn't show up, and so I went and started performing myself, which, you know, was a huge thing for me because I'm like, what am I a sex industry worker now?

Like, I'm a super well-educated, supposed tech student.

Now I'm just a sex worker.

So I just ended up doing it.

And it was clunky.

You know, it was really difficult.

A lot of the guys simply didn't know how to use a desktop computer at all right it really did help a lot of strippers most of my women were strippers I think it really expanded the sort of popularized view of what kind of women men wanted you know online we found out about all kinds of amazing fetishes

one of the fetishes involved oranges flying oranges Apparently, it's a Dutch thing.

It was really funny.

We did have one of these orange people do it, and then she threw an orange and knocked the whole system out.

It was hilarious.

But they're

talk about controlling reality with your computer.

The guy wanted oranges thrown at her.

Yeah, this is a fetish, Alex.

This is a big fetish.

There are hundreds of men out there who are really into it.

Oh, I'm ready.

You know we have more fun than the guys and they're paying us.

Oh, oh, bye, my ass, angel girl.

You know, but you're

a cannibal.

The trouble in the early days was that business was slow.

Madeline had hired these babes and they were sitting around with nothing to do.

Well, first of all, nobody knew it existed.

Second of all, people were wary about giving some random number credit card to some people.

But, you know, ultimately, their intense urge to have sex drove them to trust the internet with credit card karmas.

And this was never done before.

Never.

Like, people were like, what?

What?

Buy something online?

Who would do that?

That's crazy.

I'm not going to buy anything online.

Why would I do that?

But Madeline had a compelling story.

When journalists discovered her, they loved her.

Here she is in an interview from this time.

We wanted to do something with sex and something with computers because I was hooked up with some people who were involved in the foreign business and who were involved in the computer business as I am myself.

And so we thought, well, why don't we do online video sex?

It's a great idea.

Madeline, who graduated last week with her second master's degree, is in, now get this, the computer phone sex business.

That's right, Computer phone sex.

After the press reports, the customers started lining up.

And just remember how mad this sounded to someone in 1996.

The customers were lining up to pay for things over the internet.

Mandelin even worked out how to charge them by the minute.

By the way, this payment system would prove hugely important to the porn industry.

We'll get into that in later episodes.

I mean, you were kind of helping people over the threshold in a way, right?

In terms of using credit cards.

Well yeah, I mean sex is the biggest drive of all, right?

People will do crazy things for sex, even use the credit card over the internet.

I mean basically we invented internet commerce and just keep charging people's credit cards by the minute.

This was never done before.

She performed and she also acted as an IT help desk.

She explained to customers how to switch on their computer or warn them about the CD-ROM drive.

The round hole?

No, it's not for holding your coffee cup.

People would call like, why isn't it working?

You're like, seriously, it's not plugged in.

I don't know what a window is.

What do you mean by a window?

Like, I don't know how to resize the window.

They're like, just drag it from the corner.

Madeline's idea, that Thunderbolt on 2nd Avenue, was a live sex show online.

But in reality, she just didn't have the tech to do it.

There was no concept of streaming.

But with the help of a couple of tech wizards, she figured it out.

By 1996, they were streaming video directly through a web browser a technology then called jpeg push this was the dawn of live cams think about your zoom or face time

but back then the breakthrough was literally the digital version of an old animation book you know the ones where you flip through the images with your thumb we were the first to stream live video I mean the live part is the real component here and that's really where I came in because I've been dealing with live programming for so long it was a shoo-in for me to do to figure out how to get this live programming through the internet.

While Madeline might not have been the very first, she definitely was one of the first.

It was so cutting edge that some people were showing up with no interest in porn.

It's amazing how many customers in the beginning came on not for sex, but to figure out the technology.

They were like, wait, okay, how are you doing this?

Can you just, I will pay.

I don't want to see the girl.

Just get me the owner and I need to talk to the programmer and I need to figure out what's going on.

Porn was teaching the world how to use the internet.

Sure.

I mean people were experimenting with live video.

But at that point the people who made it work and made money from it were in porn.

Like Madeline's site plus a few streamed sex shows from Amsterdam.

Madeline though didn't stick around.

Her adventures in online sex were drawing to a close.

She was pregnant, her priorities changed, and she got an offer on Babes for You.

It came from a couple of ex-insurance salesmen from Boston.

They got into the world of live video thinking it would be a way to connect financial advisors.

They ended up being the largest purveyors of sex worldwide.

Madeline's site became part of a business that launched Flirt for Free, one of the biggest live camporn sites.

Madeline was happy though.

She bought a Bauhaus house with her earnings.

She's still there, in the house that Sex bought.

And she's proud of what she did in those wild days of online experimentation.

Madeline was in the first generation of internet entrepreneurs, the first to play with the spell-binding potential of the World Wide Web.

Madeline's thing was live video, but we could have told you stories of solo performers with amateur sites, swinger couples, credit card swindlers.

These were crazy days.

One pornographer at the time boasted that she used more bandwidth than all of Central America.

It was porn that really pushed for the streaming technology.

It was porn that really pushed for all the credit card and online commerce technology.

It was us.

We're the ones who did it.

A chick from NYU.

They set the fire.

They taught the world about the power of the web, the liberating side, and the scary, uncontrolled side.

Within a couple of decades, the fire that Madeline's generation started, it became an inferno.

The tube sites we told you about, they popped up.

Porn became ubiquitous, streamed in an instant, often for free.

Thanks in part to the Playboy court case, owners of sites like Pornhub could host vast amounts of porn without being held to account for any specific video.

Until 2020, that is,

when porn faced an almighty reckoning over illegal content, and Pornhub's world came crashing down.

It was the moment Pornhub's enemies discovered the Achilles heel of online porn.

That's our next episode.

So, in my opinion, there are two players on this planet that can kill porn online.

And they can literally kill it.

And if they decide to, it's dead.

It's done.

Absolutely impossible.

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Patricia Nilsson.

And me, Alex Barker.

Peter Sale is our lead producer and sound designer.

Edith Russolo is our associate producer.

Our editor is Karen Shikurji.

Amanda K.

Wong is our engineer.

Music composition by Pascal Wise.

Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez-Cusado.

Our executive producers are Cheryl Brumley and Jacob Goldstein.

Special thanks to Renee Kaplan and Rula Khalov at the Financial Times, Emia Lobel, Lital Molad, Justine Lang, Julia Barton and Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin Industries.

Thank you to SimilarWeb for providing our web traffic data.

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Look for the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm.

This is an iHeart podcast.