The study examined pornographic web pages contained in Secure Computing's SmartFilter database by their country-code suffixes, such as .de for Germany and .jp for Japan. Domains such as .com or .net, which are non-country specific, were not considered.
"Pages of commercial pornography, like spam, continue to not only grow at an alarming rate, but spread to new countries as they join the internet," said Mike Gallagher, senior vice president of product development at Secure Computing. "These millions of pages of pornography may create serious liability and productivity problems for employers around the world," he added.
Of the 46 million pages of pornography contained in the database, 28 million had European domains, while Australia and islands in the Pacific accounted for 12 million pages. But internet pornography was scant in African domains and almost non-existent in Middle Eastern domains.
Virtually every European domain had some pornographic sites, with Germany at the top of the heap with 10 million porn pages – closely followed by the UK with 8.5 million. Australia was third, with 5.6 million pages, while the domain belonging to the tiny Pacific island state of Niue came fourth in the league, with an astonishing 3 million pages of porn.
Editor's note: the operators of the .nu TLD have taken exception to this report.