When YouTube pioneered the streaming of music online via an online video sharing platform, there was no small amount of disquiet.
How, mused artists, managers, and record labels, could they guard the rights to their music and videos if they were being arbitrarily posted online by nameless and faceless strangers with no affiliation to the musicians themselves?
That question would take a long time to answer, even - as it was - in the relatively high profile case of music piracy, an issue that concerned nearly all of us as consumers of popular music.
When the same problem befell the world of online pornography, though, the outrage was conspicuous only by its absence.
Who would stand up for a community that many like to pretend doesn't exist outside of the laptop in their closed-curtained bedroom?
The rush of free online pornography was beckoned into public consciousness by Fabian Thylmann. It was an idea would make the tech entrepreneur extraordinarily rich, but simultaneously alter the world of adult entertainment forever.
Back in the halcyon days of yore, the world of pornography was a markedly different one. One need only listen to the ruminations of stand up comedians and - hopefully not - people your parents' age to discover that porn was once an activity that required meticulous planning, no small amount of daring, and a lengthy window of opportunity. One would need to either obtain a VHS, a DVD or a coveted website login and hide it away in a darkened room with no chance of intrusion.
All of those options, though, required something else - as well as a militaristic sense of timing - money.
Enter reclusive German tech businessman Fabian
Thylmann, who re-imagined the concept of online pornography as a global conglomerate that would make him his fortune.
The YouTube comparison is an apt one; by establishing what has become the biggest name in internet porn - Pornhub - and subsequently acquiring several rival sites including Redtube and YouPorn, Thylmann's platform allowed users to upload videos to which they conceivably did not hold any rights to, and profited from the advertisements that were hosted on his website platforms.
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Consider, for example, 2016 - when a reported 92 billion videos were watched on Pornhub - and it is not hard to see how Thylmann was able to make an astonishing amount of money very quickly indeed, even if this reported number comes after he left the business.
But what impact did his brainwave have on the adult entertainment community - located largely in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles County?
If Pornhub's own eye-watering statistics are anything to go by, most of the adult population of the Western world - and beyond - have reaped the benefits of Thylmann's idea: free porn, easily accessible, for everyone.
Yet as is so often the case, where one group benefits, another is left faltering, in limbo and facing long-term ambiguity. In this case, it is the world of adult entertainment that has plunged into uncertainty.
What was once seen by many as a convenient way to make a quick buck has become an increasingly competitive and less lucrative industry, where many girls might be picked up for a few months only to disappear weeks later with no prospects of future work and the stigma that comes hand in hand with having worked in porn.
As Jon Ronson details in his wonderful podcast series The Butterfly Effect, the world of free porn that has sprung into being on the internet has lead to producers and directors turning to unusual means to earn their living, such as bespoke porn, made for just one individual client to their exacting tastes.
The days, it would seem, of porn directors and actresses becoming enviably rich are over, bar a select few who fit perfectly into search engine optimizable categories predetermined by sites like Pornhub.
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For the rest, as Ronson explains, a kind of unhappy barren wasteland awaits them after they have grown too old to be labeled a 'teen' and yet are too young to conceivably be a 'MILF'. The days of the beautiful 26-year-old woman are, in the eyes of internet pornography, over.
As for Fabian Thylmann, he reportedly sold his company Manwin, that company of many subsidiaries in the forms of various adult entertainment channels, in 2013 for a considerable sum of money.
In the eyes of the world of adult entertainment then, it must be tempting to view Thylmann as some kind of Pied Piper in reverse, who changed the face of pornography forever and then left it behind, unrecognizable and flailing, in his wake.
H/T: Jon Ronson's 'The Butterfly Effect'
