Industry Develops Consumer Guidelines for Mobile Content Services

The guidelines are a separate -- but related -- document from the “Wireless Carrier Guidelines for Content Classification” on which CTIA also has been working, Desautels said. The carrier guidelines “are moving at about the same time frame,” he said, adding that CTIA plans to announce them after its May board meeting, and have them implemented by year’s end. The content classification system “is very much modeled on what has been agreed to in Europe and been implemented there,” Desautels said: “We are starting with our focus on the adult content and the guidelines call for a binary classification system under which content will be classified either as ‘unrestricted’ or ‘restricted’ to customers below 18 years of age.” Phase II of the initiative will focus on developing a content rating system, Desautels said.

Guideline implementation is the next big issue for the industry, Desautels said: “Once we are done with content classification, it will be up to the carriers to figure out how to implement it.” He said wireless carriers often performed as dumb pipes and couldn’t control customer access to adult content on the public network. “The models that we are coming toward as we are moving to Phase II of this initiative are things like V- chips and filtering technologies being implemented by ISPs, because in essence [a wireless carrier is] acting as an ISP.”

“The idea is to put a choice in the hands of consumers,” said Nextel’s Heidi Salow, a participant in the initiative: “The big question is who is going to control access to content and how to control it.” She predicted carriers probably would have control mechanisms in place, but methods would depend on technology and resources. “Carriers are in different places right now in terms of how it’s going to be implemented, but everyone agrees that some type of mechanism should be in place,” Salow said. She added it would be up to carriers to decide how much space to leave for a parental control. For example, she said, the movie industry leaves it up to parents to control what movies their children watch.

Guidelines are a good first step, but “the industry has to get a step further beyond those content guidelines and really start getting formal permission from the government about whether this is an appropriate technology approach that [it] can take,” said Yankee Group Analyst Adam Zawel: “They've got to develop some acceptable approaches for implementation.” Zawel said carriers would continue to loose control over the experience and the question becomes “how quickly they will become more of a pipe?” He said one way to slow that process is to “position themselves as a provider of the overall service, protector of children from adult content, of everyone from spam… If they take ownership over entire experience, maybe they can play off the regulations.”

The FCC is “in a wait-and-see mode,” said FCC Wireless Bureau Deputy Chief Skott Delacourt: “What puts the issue on our radar screen is really contributing by the public and public complaints.” Delacourt said the Commission is trying to get involved in customer education on the issue “just to be a good government, being responsive.” He said the legal issue is whether any existing laws applied to mobile content services, but “that question hasn’t been approached yet.”

The FCC is studying other countries’ handling of mobile content issues, Delacourt said. But he said it is “too early to say if one of them could be imported. We are looking at that more as observers to be educated on those issues as they emerge. Some of the things seam to have a lot of common sense appeal.”