PunterNet

» see punternet.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

PunterNet launched in 1999 under the name Field Reports, and that first name describes the whole product better than the later one did. It was a review site. Clients of UK escorts wrote up their appointments in a standard format, and the reports were indexed by provider so that other clients could read them before booking. Around the reviews sat discussion boards and a directory. The site described itself as a community for patrons and providers of adult personal services in the UK.

Structurally it was an ordinary piece of late-1990s web infrastructure applied to an unusual market: user-generated reviews with a rating scale, built years before TripAdvisor made that pattern unremarkable and in a sector where no mainstream platform would host it. The reviews were written almost exclusively by men, which is the fact that drove every argument about the site for its entire existence.

It ran for twenty-seven years, which makes it older than most things that are still online. At some point in June 2026 it stopped, with no announcement anyone has recorded. The domain no longer resolves at all, which is a harder ending than most sites get: no farewell page and no parked holding card, just an absent DNS record.

No part of this reached Turkey and I have no vantage point on the subject matter. What carries across is the jurisdictional arithmetic, which is a thoroughly ordinary story about the early web that happens to be attached to an awkward example.

~ the case file ~

~ an address in california ~

The hosting choice was the product. Paying for sex is legal in the UK; a great deal of the activity around it is not, and the law has moved repeatedly since 1999. A British-hosted site carrying this material sat within reach of British police and British courts from the day it opened. A California-hosted site carrying the same material was a US publisher with Section 230 protection for what its users wrote.

That is why the 2009 confrontation took the shape it did. Harriet Harman was Minister for Women and Equality and wanted the site gone, and the only lever available was to ask the governor of California to do it for her. There was no legal theory under which Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to act on a British minister's request about a lawful US website, and he did not.

The outcome was the one every operator of a controversial site has seen since. Coverage of the demand introduced the site to a national audience that had never encountered it, traffic rose, and the owners thanked Harman in public for the free advertising. The episode is now the first thing the site's Wikipedia article discusses, which is its own kind of legacy.

~ the second owners ~

In August 2017 the site changed hands, and the new owners made two changes that tell you what had happened to the market underneath it. They dropped the discussion boards, keeping only the reviews, because forums are a moderation liability and by 2017 the moderation climate for anything adjacent to sex work had tightened sharply. The US passed FOSTA-SESTA the following year and gutted the Section 230 protection that the California hosting had been built around.

They also opened reviews to male and transgender providers, having inherited a site whose entire format assumed one configuration of buyer and seller. Both decisions read as an attempt to carry a 1999 product into a decade that had rebuilt its assumptions, and the site lasted another nine years before the DNS record went away.

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