Many fret that the internet makes it so much easier to access porn and how culture has been "pornified." But it's also a lot easier to censor internet porn. In 2008, Hamas blocked porno sites in the Gaza Strip. The same year, Singapore banned YouPorn and RedTube. Michigan's legislature is trying to block porn from the state's prisons. Where there's a will -- and a little authoritarianism -- there's a way.

But history shows there's usually not much will, once the election is over. In 2008, the ABA Journal's Jason Krause wrote that the Bush administration's vow to fight online porn had faded with a whimper. Patrick A. Trueman, an anti-porn activist and former George H.W. Bush administration official, complained bitterly that George W. Bush's term was a huge letdown. He and other activists met with Bush attorney general John Ashcroft. “We asked that he appoint a vigorous prosecutor," Trueman said, "and he promised to do so... Instead, they appointed Drew Oosterbaan, who said he would go after the worst child porn, but let the adult content go.” The anti-porn crowd kept trying. Morality in Media got a grant from Congress in 2005 to setup a website where citizens could report obscene websites. The group sent the most offensive ones to the Justice Department, but it didn't followup on any of them. Bush Attorney General Alberto "Gonzales talked a good game," Trueman told Krause, “but there’s been no follow-through.”

If the sites can't be shut down, there's the harassment strategy. Some porn makers are threatening to leave Los Angeles because the city has instituted a condom requirement. In the mid-2000s, the FBI occasionally made surprise visits to porn studios to check whether they were had the required documentation that all the actors were legal adults. But, L.A. is still the capital of America's pornography industry.

Santorum is not alone in his dreams of a porn-free world, of course. Steve Jobs once mused about "freedom from porn" with Gawker's Ryan Tate in a late-night drunken (for Tate at least) email exchange. Jobs was talking about Apple's policy of keeping porn out of its official App Store for the iPhone. And, of course, we know as a result that no one uses the iPhone for pornography.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

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