Germany tops porn Web hosting superleague

Excluding the US, that is

By Lester Haines • Get more from this author

Posted in Music and Media, 24th June 2004 13:55 GMT

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Germany is the Web host with the most - at least in terms of pornography. The .de TLD boasts 10,030,200 pages of smut, beating the UK's 8,506,800 pages into the runners-up spot.

That's according to Secure Computing, which has just carried out a study of the global distribution of pornographic web pages by the top 100 individual country domains - excluding US domains - using the Secure Computing SmartFilter(R) v4 Control List.

Secure Computing's report into the findings contains some interesting factoids. For instance, by far the biggest concentrations of porn are to be found in Europe and the Pacific. Indeed, humble Niue (.nu) hosts three million pages, elevating it to fourth spot in the league.

The Middle East, by contrast, is almost porn-free. Only Israel (.il) appears on the filth radar with 77,800 pages; and the single Arab nation to host people getting naked is Libya (.ly).

Naturally, the Europeans are going at it like jack rabbits. Every European domain contains some porn pages, with even Liechtenstein (.li) taking time off from producing stamps to knock together 27,800 pages.

And as for Africa, of the 389,400 total pages recorded a whopping 307,000 were found in the Sao Tome (.st) domain.

According to Secure Computing veep Mike Gallagher: "Pages of commercial pornography, like spam, continue to not only grow at an alarming rate, but spread to new countries as they join the Internet. These millions of pages of pornography may create serious liability and productivity problems for employers around the world

"Given the international nature of the Internet, filtering at the gateway level for networks in businesses, schools and homes will remain for the foreseeable future the only effective way to control Internet pornography."

The full top ten is: