“Pimps in Hong Kong are luring customers by sending hi-tech digital images of prostitutes to potential clients over their cellphones, a news report said on Tuesday. The hustlers are exploiting the latest cellphone technology to beam lurid photographs of vice girls onto the latest colour-screen handsets.” — News24 (South Africa)

Given the way that the latest innovations are influencing the oldest profession, brothels are fast becoming an anachronism. Red-light districts are being replaced by red-light technologies: “escort” web sites, PayPal transactions, illicit rendezvous arranged by email and instant messenger, call girls liberated from “trick pads” by their cell phones. And presumably the pace of innovation will only intensify as information technology completes its transformation of modern life.

Funnily enough, telecommunications companies must be quite content about this burgeoning relationship between sex and technology, since it greatly multiplies their revenue opportunities. In brothels, transactions are conducted face-to-face and thus profit no outside parties, except perhaps the landlord. However, with these new means of doing business, every time a prostitute and a john conduct a transaction, a telecommunications service provider receives a fee. (If the bandwidth to send pictures costs more than the bandwidth to send voice or text, the fee is even greater.) What is significant about this is that it gives big business a vested interest in the promotion of prostitution. This leads to some very interesting possibilities…

For example, one of the trends in recent times has been for bandwidth providers to buy up content providers, as happened when AOL (bandwidth) merged with Time-Warner (content). Extrapolating from this, you could imagine a day when corporate executives realize that prostitution (which is facilitated by transmitting images and, eventually, video) consumes a great deal of bandwidth. Seeking to capitalize on this, they might buy up prostitution businesses — which is not a completely ridiculous possibility, given that a brothel in Australia recently joined the stock market. In effect, this would transform telecom companies into pimp corporations.

And if that were to happen, you can only imagine the additional ripple effects it would have. You know how telecoms tend to call you and try to sell you their services? Imagine if, in addition to local and long-distance, the telecoms offered sexual services! There you are eating dinner, the phone rings, and suddenly Verizon is offering you its latest bundle: call-waiting, caller ID — and call girls too.

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