Bringing Japanese Uncensored Pornography To The Western's Internet: The Web's Dark Corner Conspiracy
15/06/1996
Soon after the first-ever photo was uploaded to the internet, which was a promotional photo of Les Horribles Cernettes, people started seeing the possibility of what the technology could provide.
It didn't take long until the early internet was quickly recognized as a platform where various types of content could be shared, including sexual imagery.
In the early days, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were popular for sharing images and text files, including adult content. At the time, users were connected via dial-up modems to exchange files. Then, after that, people started using Usenet Newsgroups in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to share all kinds of content, including explicit images.
But it was only through the World Wide Web, that things escalated fast.
Part of which, was made possible by James Arthur Watkins, an American businessmen who used his company to host Japanese pornography to be made accessible to the Western internet population.
N.T. Technology.
Born in November 1963 in Washington, Watkins was raised on a family farm, where his mother worked for Boeing, and his father worked for a telephone company.
Watkins joined the U.S. Army in 1982, and it was during his time serving that he he learned computers and the early internet.
Then, in 1998, while was still enlisted, Watkins founded N.T. Technology, which is based in Reno, Nevada.
Initially, the website earned its money from advertising. But later, Watkins used the hosting to host several domains, including pornography.
And one of them, was "Asian Bikini Bar", a website dedicated to Japanese pornography.
Because Watkins hosted the website in the U.S., he was able to circumvent the strict pornography censorship in Japan.
Having increasing traffic from internet users from the U.S., Watkins braved himself to have N.T. Technology to offer hosting services to Japanese adult entertainment websites that wished to get visitors from the U.S., and couldn't be hosted in Japan due to censorship.
One of which, was the 2channel textboard website.
The website was created in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura, but was later seized by Watkins when a security breach exposed users' credit card data.
Following the dot-com boom, Watkins left the Army to focus on N.T. Technology, and that it was in October 2020, that the media reported N.T. Technology to have hosted domains with names suggesting connections to child pornography.
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