from www.dialaphone.co.uk – Cell phone porn is a booming business. It’s also a business that is threatened from every side as parents, legislators and various moralists try to insist upon its demise. Mobile phones today are better equipped than ever before to handle porn downloads but various laws and restrictions are popping up all over the place to limit the proliferation of cell phone porn. Will porn on mobile phones survive? Since porn is one of the few recession-proof industries out there it’s unlikely that this service is going to disappear quietly but it’s going to have to face a fight.

Porn and Technology

Briefly let’s just point out that as long as there has been any sort of technology, there has been pornography created by that technology. Way back in the days of teletype and typewriters there were people who created elaborate pornographic images out of the letters and numbers on a keyboard. In the early days of Atari gaming systems there were very crude attempts at making video game porn. So wherever there is new technology there is going to be new porn and there’s nothing different about mobile phones as far as that goes.

Cell Phone Porn: 2005-2006

Cell phone porn probably dates back to the days of the first cell phones starting with whatever type of phone sex people were participating in using these phones. However these early phones weren’t equipped to actually send anything pornographic that wasn’t just a voice so there wasn’t true cell phone porn in those early days. As technology advanced and phones gained text, camera and video capabilities, cell phone porn started to really taking off. The boom years for mobile phone porn seem to be 2005 and 2006.

In 2004 an article in Wired predicted that it was unlikely that we would ever see people spending millions of dollars on cell phone porn. A scant year later Reuters actually informed us that the 2004 spending on pornographic images for cell phones was over $400 million. Asia was a popular place for this type of purchase; it was reported that 50% of Koreans were downloading cell phone porn by 2005. By the end of 2006, research indicated that nearly one and a half billion dollars had been spent on cell phone porn and it was predicted that this amount would more than double by 2011.

The Back Lash: Cell Phone Porn Laws in 2007-2008

There is often a backlash to the spread of pornography and we definitely saw that happen around the world in regards to cell phone porn. The big sweep against mobile phone porn came around 2007 and continued throughout 2008. Many countries started to institute laws governing mobile phone porn around this time.

From our previous article on the legalities of mobile phone use:

“Do you like the idea of being able to take your porn with you wherever you go? It’s not something that you can do on your cell phone in all parts of the world. For example, UK phone service providers abide by a Code of Practice which labels adult mobile content as “18 and up”. The intention is to prevent underage mobile phone users from having access to adult content. Japan has filtering laws designed to filter web access on mobile phones in a similar fashion. Switzerland has a ban prohibiting the sale of pornographic films and images through cell phones. People sending any sort of sexually explicit message or image through mobile devices in China – whether or not the individual receiving the message is eighteen – can be fined and even imprisoned for their lewd behavior.”

Mobile Phone Porn Today and in the Future

Today we’re finally starting to see a balance as the pendulum against cell phone porn seems to be swinging back towards the middle. There continue to be laws created surrounding the availability of mobile phone porn but they tend to be designed specifically to protect the safety of certain groups (such as children) rather than to prohibit of-age adults from viewing porn on their cell phones if they choose to. Mobile porn makers are advancing in terms of what they can create and how they can offer it.

The advances made in mobile phone screens and mobile web access make the cell phone an ideal device for viewing porn these days. It’s easy to download videos almost anywhere that you go. Advanced phones with large screens and high-resolution video capabilities give interested viewers the opportunity to watch the porn that they want at a viewing quality that far surpasses what was available on earlier phones. A particularly popular type of porn is iPhone porn. As cell phones become increasingly customizable, porn apps are likely to pop up all over the place.

Of course, some countries are more liberal about cell phone porn than others are. To date, America has held off on playing a big role in the purchase of mobile phone porn as compared to markets in Europe and Japan. In fact, an article from Bloomberg earlier this year reported that Japanese carriers were having to limit their most frequent users of cell phone porn because the amount of activity there was placing a serious strain on the networks. Fears of offending political groups, religious groups and parents who buy cell phones for their kids have caused many carriers to block this type of content on the phones that they sell in America. However, there is no denying that there’s a lot of profit to be made in this industry and North Americans are loosening up a bit and joining in on the mobile porn download frenzy. China remains the biggest holdout which makes sense since the country censors regular web content as well but other countries (such as Cambodia) also continue to crack down on cell phone porn.

The Bottom Line

There is a huge market for mobile phone porn. Today’s technology makes it easier than ever for this to become a super huge industry. As a result, we’re likely to see an increase in cell phone porn downloads as the years go on. However, there will always continue to be people who oppose pornography and who will work to create laws and restrictions around how it is made available and where it can be viewed. The back and forth between those who are for it and those who are against it will naturally balance out the industry and create some limitations upon its growth.