Third-generation mobile handsets won’t be available in Ireland until the end of this year, but the Irish government already is laying plans to establish a national registry of the units and their owners. The measure is necessary to protect minors from unsuitable content, among other things, according to Communications Minister Dermot Ahern.
The registry is part of a multi-pronged approach being promoted by the Irish Cellular Industry Association to ensure secure and responsible use of mobile services. Other aspects of the plan include an industry code of practice and a parental guide to mobile phone services. Cellular carriers O2, Meteor, and Vodafone support the effort, saying that carriers must facilitate parental access to minors’ accounts in order to make mobile communication safe for all users. The companies also will launch one of the world’s first mobile-content filtering trials this summer. If it is successful, they say it will add another safeguard to the system.
In hindsight, Ahern noted that Ireland should have acted similarly with regard to picture phones, but by the time anyone realized the potential for the devices to distribute inappropriate content to minors there already were millions of such handsets in use in the country.
In taking a proactive approach to regulating new media services (primarily video streaming) that will be available on 3G networks, Ireland hopes to avoid the kind of tight spot in which Australia found itself earlier this year. In late April, the Australian Federal Minister for Information Technology and Communications was forced to issue an emergency ruling restricting the availability of adult mobile content after that country’s legislators and regulatory bodies were unable to cement appropriate regulations despite 12 months of effort. Had the emergency ruling not been issued just 10 days before the first soft-core porn appeared on the wireless bands in Oz, carriers and content providers might have been able to avoid any censorship of premium adult content.
In conjunction with the industry code of practice, the national 3G registry will facilitate the apprehension of people who use their phones illicitly, Ahern and the ICIA insist. In addition to keeping smut out of the hands of children, the code addresses unsolicited commercial communications (mobile spam), child pornography, and malicious person-to-person communications.
The major European cellular carriers instituted a similar code of practice early this year.
