One of the issues rising up various stakeholders’ agendas, including the press, charities and parents, is children accessing inappropriate material on their mobile phones over the net. Most operators are very sensitive to this issue, in a way that their fixed line counterparts would find inexplicable.

Parents (those who know that the net accessed via the mobile, anyway) are probably more concerned about mobile access too. Put simply, it’s far easier for a kid to be away from prying adult eyes with a mobile, than it is on the family computer.

As an example, little Johnny (where by accident or design) accesses some porn on the family computer. Who is to blame? It’s a curious fact that you’d have a hard time pinning it on anyone, actually - otherwise I’m sure we’d have seen a rash of "my kid was traumatized for life" legal cases. Thus, computer manufacturer, ISP, browser supplier or even porn site owner are not really responsible.

In the mobile world, this doesn’t seem to be the case and many operators are convinced that they will be held to account if the same kid accesses the same porn over their mobile network. This is despite that the operator isn’t condoning or promoting it - but merely opening up their network to the big, glorious, but sometimes, bad internet.

I think, in this case, they may well be right, as it’s got all the hallmarks of a great tabloid press story and in these kinds of situations, operators’ reputations can only be tarnished. The mystery is how the fixed line ISP’s got away with it, relatively scot free.

In fact, this is a no-win area for operators, as opening their gardens is exactly what many of their customers are asking them to do, albeit for many different reasons, with accessing porn only one of the less legitimate ones.

Various approaches have been considered and tried from the walled garden, to classifying every site by hand, to simply warning parents of the dangers, which is UK operator, Orange’s latest idea.

So it’s interesting to see a new independent entrant coming into the arena, RuleSpace, with a mobile phone based product (via Business Week) They’re already a major player online for parental controls, with 70% of the market - despite having only 10 employees.

I forecast that this is going to be a booming sector in the next 5 years, as operators are going to disproportionately support and promote parental control products as they try understandably, to maintain confidence and support their reputations.

A billion dollar market? Very possibly actually. Say 10% of all 2 billion mobiles end up with some form of parental control at $1 a month each. Hmmm.

The next battle will be making the application usable enough for the parent, without it being able to be hacked by the kids….