While some may debate the importance of the mobile porn market, the article seems to take the market’s power as a given, choosing to focus on filtering issues related to mobile porn.
“The explosion of pornography on the Internet has spawned a huge business in parental controls and other blocking tools,” Li Yuan, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote. “Now the effort is repeating in the wireless world.”
According to a Pew Internet study from last summer, 45 percent of teens own cellphones and a quarter of them have used their phones to access the Internet. While those numbers have fueled the fear of parents looking to protect their children from Internet porn, and now mobile porn, they have created opportunity for technology firms, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But as the article points out, blocking mobile porn presents a unique set of challenges.
“Experts in blocking software say identifying porn on cellphones is much more difficult than on computers because wireless websites usually have very little text and the images are much smaller,” Yuan wrote.
Alistair Allan, CEO of RuleSpace, a firm specializing mobile filtering software, told the Wall Street Journal that filtering software for mobile means that “you’ll either miss it or overblock.”
According to the article, the industry leaders aren’t the mainstays of online filtering like McAfee and Symantec. Instead, the article points to smaller firms like RuleSpace and Blue Coat Systems.
While the article acknowledges that mobile phone carriers have taken measures to filter adult content from their networks, Yuan points out that “none of the phone companies has deployed sophisticated systems.”
RuleSpace sells its product to BellSouth, while Blue Coat has made inroads with Vodafone.
