However, PG doesn't mention the incredibly successful startups that start out with evil/crime and then later go good: ones that start with spammy & unethical means to get initial users and pirated content startups.
I think most people strive to do good, but the world itself is a very evil place that sometimes needs adapting to.
What's wrong with Jimmy Wales operating a porn site? I don't see how that's related to Wikipedia.
Here's something I found by a quick google:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11640411/
Even without stats, it just seems like something that's blatantly obvious. It's a very common problem with couples for the guy to be lusting after other women. We, as a culture, are inundated with erotica. The internet allows people to look at pretty much anything they want in privacy. There are loads of adds for web history cleaners. Etc.
It just doesn't seem like a hard conclusion to draw...
Porn makes money therefore it is abused? Lusting after other women predates the modern porn industry. For example, "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors wife."
Very often our assumptions about what "must be" are wrong.
"Porn makes money therefore it is abused"
That isn't what I'm saying. Porn makes so much more money than any other online industry that it seems very likely the money comes from abuse. Similar to why the drug trade is so lucrative.
Also, I did not say lust is a new phenomena. In fact, you agree with my point. Since it is such a common aspect of being a male throughout history, then it seems easy to infer men are likely to indulge in an easy outlet for eroticism.
Despite it being a conservative claim, and consequently people don't like it, the breakdown of the family is a very big problem.
Why assume that "the family" is perfect as it is? If the freedom to trade money for videos is detrimental to a social structure, to limit freedom to preserve a social structure seems regressive.
But they haven't switched to doing good.
Those are obviously the biggest, most well known. Beneath the surface, a ton of companies are doing similar things, at a lesser level, but it often goes unseen. Many cams and dating sites started out spamming and fake profiles/female profiles. Most startups that require a "network effect" often create a lot of fake users at the start.
Then they put together a program with the US government that made them money when they prevented people from defaulting, thus reversing the incentive. They built out reminder programs, tested, iterated and improved their default rate to one of the lowest in the industry.
Of course, the bush administration is ending the "Voluntary Flexible Agreement" program which made this possible.