{"id":145526,"date":"2022-10-04T16:16:56","date_gmt":"2022-10-05T00:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=145526"},"modified":"2022-10-05T05:13:57","modified_gmt":"2022-10-05T13:13:57","slug":"the-players-ball-a-genius-a-con-man-and-the-secret-history-of-the-internets-rise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=145526","title":{"rendered":"The Players Ball: A Genius, a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet\u2019s Rise"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Kushner writes in this 2019 book<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\nSitting back in his office in Tijuana, Cohen readily spun his story on the phone to anyone who\u2019d listen. \u201cWhen Kremen filed this lawsuit, he did us a big favor,\u201d Cohen told Luke Ford, who wrote a widely read blog about the online porn business, \u201cbecause if you don\u2019t sue someone within a period of time, it can be construed as giving implied permission. We decided at that point, instead of fighting forty lawsuits by people using the name Sex.com, to take care of Kremen.\u201d This included both Fantasy Man and Warshavsky, whom Cohen considered part of Kremen\u2019s team. \u201cWe\u2019ve got Warshavsky\u2019s tit in a wringer,\u201d he went on. \u201cWe\u2019ve got him cold. He\u2019s fucked.\u201d
\n Cohen slipped into his pedantic mode, deriding the other dot-com moguls as technological neophytes overinflating their claims. \u201cWe have 8,799,232 members,\u201d he told Ford. \u201cThe other adult internet sites are not even in the ballgame. Most people do not understand the internet. You get these fools like Seth Warshavsky who claims he\u2019s doing all these millions of dollars\u2019 worth of business. If writers were more technical they could check out the information.\u201d
\n Cohen told Ford to do a WHOIS search for Sex.com, and waited as he heard Ford\u2019s fingers rattle across his keys. He wanted to show Ford proof that he was dominating Warshavsky\u2019s traffic. \u201cDo you see the number 11083?\u201d he asked. \u201cThat\u2019s an autonomous system number. That means you report to more than one place. That means that more than one ISP feeds you.\u201d The implication was that Sex.com needed more than one internet service provider to handle all its eyeballs.
\n He had Ford then type in the address of Warshavsky\u2019s site, Club Love. \u201cHear that noise in the background?\u201d Cohen asked, as he put the phone up to his own computer, which played back a fuzzy sound like TV static. \u201cClub Love\u2019s internet provider is cable and wireless,\u201d he went on. \u201cHe\u2019s running out of an IP address of 166.48.217.250. Club Love is registered as JNS Communications Inc. and the address is 208.139.0.21. He only has one ISP. He\u2019s probably running less than a T3 line, and yet he claims he\u2019s doing all this business. From what I can see he\u2019s not running more than a couple of T1s. His claims of millions of dollars are all BS.
\n \u201cNow, let\u2019s take a look at Cybererotica. Cybererotica is fed by IGallery. IGallery. Cybererotica is running greater than T3. About 60\u201370 megs, probably two T3s. It looks like they have a big video stream coming through. Clublove is a dinky site. Cybererotica doesn\u2019t even have an autonomous system number. Bandwidth is not indicative of how much money you make. You can make millions of dollars with TI if you\u2019re running nothing but text. But once you start doing video and pictures, it eats up more bandwidth. For every dollar made, how much is kept? Cybererotica does lots of webhosting and buying of other people\u2019s traffic. He has great gross but shitty net. While Sex.com has tremendous gross and a 98% net, I don\u2019t need to buy traffic. That is what separates the men from the boys.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Author David Kushner lacks basic reading comprehension<\/a>. The following actions and comments he attributes to me are clearly attributed on my 1999 blog to a “Vegas Lee”, who is definitely not me<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n Curious to learn more, Ford drove down across the border to meet the man once and for all. \u201cI wanted to see this infamous Cohen everyone always talks about,\u201d as he blogged soon after. Once in Tijuana, he came to a busy thoroughfare with a median of palm trees. Strip malls with UPS stores, tanning salons, and dentist offices lined either side of the road. He pulled into one spot along Diego Rivera Avenue, and went into a brand-new office building, where he was greeted by Jim Powell, Cohen\u2019s gray-haired associate of many years. Powell showed Ford around the computer room, which buzzed with servers and wires and heat. It seemed impressive, but, then again, he had no idea who owned what. But the man himself was nowhere to be found, having gone to Vegas, he was told.
\n Before long, Ford had had enough. He considered the industry leaders his friends, he later wrote, and descending into the belly of a beast, where Cohen and his cronies were suing everyone into oblivion, was making him feel queasy. \u201cThese people are into a very heavy revenge trip that goes well beyond scary and it seems to me they do not care about the harm to our industry that they will cause,\u201d he later wrote. \u201cI felt so sick after seeing what I saw that I just made an excuse and left Tijuana.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wonder how many other stupid mistakes the author made?<\/p>\n

Here is his bio at the back of the book: <\/p>\n

David Kushner is an award-winning journalist and author. His books include Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture; Jonny Magic & the Card Shark Kids: How a Gang of Geeks Beat the Odds and Stormed Las Vegas; Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America\u2019s Legendary Suburb; Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto; and Alligator Candy: A Memoir. Kushner is also author of the graphic novel Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D , illustrated by Koren Shadmi; and the ebook, The Bones of Marianna: A Reform School, a Terrible Secret, and a Hundred-Year Fight for Justice. Two collections of his magazine stories are available as audiobooks, The World\u2019s Most Dangerous Geek: And More True Hacking Stories and Prepare to Meet Thy Doom: And More True Gaming Stories.<\/p>\n

A contributing editor of Rolling Stone , Kushner has written for publications including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Esquire , and GQ , and has been an essayist for National Public Radio. His work is featured in several \u201cbest of\u201d anthologies: The Best American Crime Reporting, The Columbia Journalism Review\u2019s Best Business Writing, The Best Music Writing, and The Best American Travel Writing.<\/p>\n

He is the winner of the New York Press Club award for Best Feature Reporting. His ebook The Bones of Marianna was selected by Amazon as a Best Digital Single of 2013. NPR named his memoir, Alligator Candy, one of the best books of 2016. He has taught as a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here are some highlights from the book:<\/p>\n

\n* Among those who were seeking Cohen out was Yishai Hibari, an Israeli musician turned adult webmaster who wanted to take out ads on the site. Word was that Cohen was doing three times the traffic. Among the porn stars in bikinis and guys with greased-back hair, he saw what he recalled to be \u201ca funny chubby guy with an important look on his face,\u201d walking a small white Chihuahua with a red ribbon around its neck. Cohen was always chatty, and chummy, friends never saw him in a bad mood.<\/p>\n

* It didn\u2019t take long for the success to go to Cohen\u2019s head. He became known for wandering porn shows with a smug smile, and a polo shirt embroidered with the Sex.com logo. Even among the rulers of the Wild Porn West online, he soon gained an unseemly reputation. Just as he had done for years, he put his amateur trademark attorney scam to use by suing anyone, and everyone, who had the word sex in a domain name. Serge Birbair, the owner of sexia.com, was among those who, as he put it, was \u201charassed by Stephen Cohen.\u201d When hit with Cohen\u2019s lawsuit, he didn\u2019t have the money to fight back against the traffic king\u2014and chose instead to relent, and hand over sexia.com to Cohen. \u201cIt cost me money to defend myself, and it cost me a lot of grief,\u201d as one pornmaster put it after caving in. \u201cEventually, I decided it ain\u2019t worth the fight.\u201d
\n Cohen reveled in the power. No one could stop him with Sex.com on his side\u2014not even the guy who claimed to own it. One day, Cohen received a certified letter from Kremen\u2019s attorney, demanding he not only cease and desist using Sex.com, but send the money he\u2019d earned from the site Kremen\u2019s way. Cohen had one response. Kremen could go fuck himself. He\u2019d been selling sucking and fucking online since the 1980s, and Sex.com was rightfully his. As he later told Kremen\u2019s attorney, \u201cIf anybody stole it, it was Gary Kremen stealing it from me.\u201d<\/p>\n

* While Kremen busied himself with new investments and consulting work, he hired a young attorney, Sheri Falco, to navigate the uncharted waters of a potential lawsuit. Falco, an intellectual property attorney, found Kremen doing a million things, as usual, in his office\u2014starting an incubator, making calls, surfing the net. It didn\u2019t take long poking around for her to find out that Cohen was on a lawsuit tear of his own, riding on the back of the trademark protection he filed. She hit back, filing a trademark opposition to put his on hold.
\n Going on the public record against Cohen had another unintended effect. It got the attention of the many enemies he was making in the online porn industry. And, before long, Falco got a call from the two biggest, and most powerful, ones of all, Ron \u201cFantasy Man\u201d Levi and Seth Warshavsky, who had an urgent message for Kremen. They wanted to help him take Cohen out.
\n They were good friends to have. Fantasy Man was considered by many to be the godfather of the online porn business. A dark-haired, imposing strongman, he lived in a ten-thousand-square-foot California mansion. Fantasy Man had been hustling since learning to shoot pool from the basis of the movie The Hustler himself, Fast Eddie, when he was just fourteen. With a knack for business and a passion for technology, Fantasy Man made his first fortune in audiotext, or phone sex, and parlayed that into the first large network of adult sites on the internet, Cybererotica.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Kushner writes in this 2019 book: Sitting back in his office in Tijuana, Cohen readily spun his story on the phone to anyone who\u2019d listen. \u201cWhen Kremen filed this lawsuit, he did us a big favor,\u201d Cohen told Luke … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-pornography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=145526"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":145542,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145526\/revisions\/145542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=145526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=145526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=145526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}