The two-tiered system provides voluntary guidelines for content carriers who have expressed concerns that a wave of mobile adult content is coming, and is likely to be followed by criticism and outrage from parents and religious organizations.
The proposed system calls on carriers to clearly label content that is intended for adults and provide filtering mechanisms to help parents block access to adults-only content. More specifically, all content would be labeled as either Generally Accessible Carrier Content and Restricted Carrier Content.
Jonathan Adelstein, head of the Federal Communications Commission, said his agency would prefer for the mobile industry to regulate itself.
“This industry effort should really help families who rely on their cellphones but do not want their children inadvertently exposed to adult material,” Adelstein said.
While the mobile adult industry is profitable in areas of Asia and Europe, there simply isn’t a significant amount of mobile adult content available in the U.S.
Brickhouse Mobile and Xobile have both signed contracts with multiple adult content providers, but the deals mostly call for softcore material, and most major carriers have announced that they will not carry any hardcore content.
Still, most technology experts believe it is only a matter of time before porn rules cellphones and Blackberries because the profit potential is too huge to ignore.
“The wireless industry has no choice," wireless industry analyst Peter Gorhamsaid. “The adult industry is gearing up to offer content on the cellphone. One question is access for minors but there is a problem of people viewing adult content in public. It's good that they are doing this before the big explosion of content happens.”
Of interest to adult webmasters, the CTIA also announced it plans a second phase of ratings for Internet content as well as Internet-filtering solutions
