If your local sex shoppe put internet kiosks in for customer use, what would you use it for? To look up a nice place to have dinner after you’ve shopped? To search Amazon for the toy you wanted, so you can show the clerk what to bring you? To read porn reviews before you pick through the 3 for $10 DVD bin?

If you’re at the Deja Vu Love Boutique in City of Industry (southern California), you can’t do any of that yet, as the city has told Deja Vu to take its internet access out. Apparently it violates their business use permit.

The LA Times blogger does a wink-wink-nudge-nudge and implies that the only reason for an adult store to provide internet access is for customers to surf porn (Love Boutique vs. City of (not every) Industry), but honestly, I can think of a number of additional reasons customers would use the service. Check your email to see if you have to be home soon, see if your Craigslist hookup is still waiting for you and your bag o’ toys to show up, etc.

Odd that the city claims an internet kiosk is not a permitted extension of adult retail. I realized, reading the story, that my default position is “everywhere should have internet kiosk in case I’m out and about and need to look up an address, a map, a phone number, check my email, etc” even though I have a phone that can do those things. Internet access, even if I have to pay for it, is more like … like I wish all retail would also provide drinking water and a bathroom. Or like phone and air conditioning, although the cost of that is usually worked into the prices of the items rather than a per-minute charge.

I also default to “they get harassed because sex is an easy political target” but for all I know, it’s very clear in the rules what you can and can’t have at a business, fair or not, stupid or not, and Deja Vu deliberately flaunted the rules. My instinct tells me that’s not the case, but I don’t have enough information to state any facts beyond what the LA Times says. I’m just musing on the whole situation, because it would never have occurred to me that internet access could be considered something separate from existing business operations.

[via Melissa Gira]