First, Apple. Now, Walmart. Porn gets no tech respect.

When Walmart announced earlier this week that it was acquiring Vudu, a Silicon Valley startup in the business of delivering streaming movies to TV sets, I wondered what might happen to the adult movie channel built into the Vudu service. It didn't take long for Walmart to let us know. They're pulling the plug on porn.

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It's not really that big of a shocker, is it? I mean, c'mon - Walmart is a family-friendly retailer and there's no way a company with that sort of reputation is going to let itself be associated with an online red-light district. Can you imagine the potential backlash in America's heartland? A post on Techcrunch has the memo that Walmart has sent out to Vudu's "After-Dark" partners. The memo is all business, no morals. Still, it's kind of ironic how Walmart and Apple, which has gone PG-13 in its app store, are becoming the gatekeepers of what's appropriate and what's not for our online experiences. Apparently, bikini babes on a mobile phone is taboo - as is streaming adult films on the TV. Mind you, I'm not saying one way or the other what's right or wrong here. I have children and, just like any parent, I want to shield them from as much inappropriate content as possible, whether it's bad language, extreme violence or even the extra-long Girls Gone Wild commercials that are aired on Comedy Central. I'm no prude, so I'm not necessarily offended by this sort of stuff. And my understanding was that Vudu had some strict locks in place to make sure that kids weren't accidentally accessing it after school. Someday, my kids will be able to turn their own moral filters on and off - once they're old enough to make decisions for themselves. Until then, that's my job - and Vudu put tools in place for parents to do maintain control of it. In the meantime, it's back to the dark alleys of the Internet for the connoisseurs of online adult content. You surely won't be finding it in the online aisles of Walmart or the Apple app store.