MWC: Fighting the good fight, but is it the right fight?

BARCELONA--The GSM Association has always been an activist organization. It pushes all sorts of industry initiatives from pushing 3G connectivity in laptops to launching Third World wireless penetration projects to producing short films for the mobile phone. The association is always on the lookout for a way to make wireless more prevalent, useful and ultimately more profitable for its carrier clientele.

Its latest initiatives are no different. At Mobile World Congress, the GSMA announced a sweeping program to eliminate child pornography from mobile networks, inviting carriers across the world to implement technical mechanisms that will block offending sites from their networks. The next day, the GSMA unveiled its global IP Exchange network, which will link wireless carriers directly together through a private backbone. The aim is to ensure that cross-carrier communications are prioritized and high quality of service is maintained between any wireless-to-wireless transaction.

Both efforts, though unrelated, seem to reflect a growing belief by the GSMA that the wireless data world has to be insulated from the excesses and evils of the wireline data Internet world that sired it. You certainly won’t find me arguing for the rights of child pornographers, and I readily admit that inter-carrier traffic could be improved. But I worry that these initiatives, in seeking to separate the wireless Internet from the wireline Internet, could result in further measures -- some not so high-minded -- to shelter wireless customers and separate the information we access from our phones from that which we access on our computers.

Child pornography is a crime and it needs to be stopped, but it seems like it needs to be a global effort grounded in laws, followed up by prosecution that eventually throws child pornographers in jail. The GSMA’s active stance on the crime is noble and probably necessary considering child sexual abuse for profit runs rampant around the world. But I also wonder why this initiative wasn’t instituted by the World Wide Web Consortium or other industry groups responsible for the content of the entirety of the Internet, not just the wireless portion. Instead of trying to make the wireless Web a better place, I’d rather see the entire Web a safer place.

Despite the child pornography, hate sites and other heinous content that proliferates the Internet, the World Wide Web has been a profoundly successful institution. Almost everyone has come to the conclusion of late that the wireless network must serve as another means to access that same Web, rather than create a distinct Internet for the mobile phone. We’ve tried that already, remember? In their efforts to protect their customers, carriers created closed-garden networks that failed to appeal to anyone but a select few. If the wireless Internet is to succeed, it has to be open to all of the Web, good or bad. And if as an industry we need to eliminate the bad on the Internet, we need to do that under the auspices of the Internet industry, not create our own private haven within it.

E-mail me at kfitchard@telephonyonline.com.