For as long as the Internet has been with us there has been a view that porn is what drives growth.

Now that concept has actually been with us since the time of the invention of the printing press. Back then of course, there were essentially two business models for content, or three depending on your point of view. There was the the business of printing bibles, which Gutenberg is famous for, and then there is the business of printing porn, which no one talks about, but which made the Marquis de Sade famous. And then there was the business of printing political tracts and leaflets, which of course was the reason that the Statute of Queen Anne was legislated and which brought in the whole concept of copyright. ( By bringing into play the Statute of Queen Anne and the era of copyright, printers could be rewarded for supporting the policies of the king).

In recent times people have talked about how porn drives the growth of the Internet. And for a while there is probably little doubt that it did.

But in recent years porn hasn't been cutting it in the growth stakes.

What has been happening is that the growth of the Internet has been driven by P2P.

Now that presents quite an interesting quandary for legislators all round the world. On the one hand you have the copyright industry driving huge revenues that largely travel to the US. On the other hand you have even bigger revenues from the sale of computer hardware and infrastructure that are also largely flowing towards the US.

If the copyright industry wins and P2P file sharing is impeded or stopped, what happens next? Answer: People stop downloading movies, music and other content. And then they don't need the newest processor in their computer to maximise speeds of file conversion; they don't need the maximum speed connection for their downloads. In fact they don't need a lot of stuff that currently they think they need.

And so they stop spending.

Now the problem with this model is that the US economy is down the toilet anyway. Consumer confidence is shattered and not shaken. And if you add the concept that you really will be sued into oblivion (beyond that which is currently taking place anyway) you create yet another blow to the little confidence that there is currently.

So it becomes obvious, surely. P2P has to remain in place, but the US government will have to go through the motions of pretenting that they are concerned and will try to stop it. It is the same situation as that of grass in California: the 500 pond elephant in the room is the fact that the biggest cash crop in California is grass. The problem is that to legalize it they have to convince a huge amount of uptight conservatives that the stories that they have been spreading for years about drugs are actually untrue.

This then is the quandary that lawmakers and politicians face with regard to P2P: The more they demonize it, the more it will come back and bite them on the bum.

The truth is that the P2P is making the Internet industry and the Computer industry go round. Kill it and the economy goes from critical to stone dead. Not a good look.