There is concern that children are easily exposed to unfiltered content – adult or pornographic sites, or sites that have violent content or graphic images and information not suitable for children. The question arises – who is responsible for such content on mobile phones that children access or produce.
It should be mandatory that mobile phone operators provide filtering systems or software that would prevent children from accessing unsafe content on their mobile phones. Operators are aware of the age of subscribers and they should be required to filter or block access to sites on mobile phone .
Child online protection is certainly a very important concern for everyone
First, mandatory blocking or filtering it is a sensitive issue for some members, because promoting the ability for providers to filter of block access to sites on the grounds of child protection, can also be used as a pretext for filtering and blocking for political or other reasons. If we are to include text on this then there would need to be some recognition of the freedom of expression dimension of the issue.
Second, we have tried to steer away from content issues, because they open up many other policy areas that are beyond the scope of the document. In general, content accessed through an Internet-connected mobile device are provided by third parties who are not associated with the mobile telecommunications operator. (The only exceptions are adult SMS/MMS services and premium-rate phone services, but these are a limited category.)
If the mobile operator is to be treated as a gatekeeper with responsibility for all content accessed through the device, then there could be no end of issues that we might want to demand that they take responsibility for - including defamation, consumer protection for third-party e-commerce sites, etc. Responsibility for these is currently falls on the content provider - for example Amazon, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia - rather than on the mobile operator who is treated as a mere intermediary.
This doesn't necessarily mean that we can't add some reference to child online protection, but I suggest that it would have to be very narrowly crafted to avoid opening up a Pandora's box of issues that the mobile provider is ill-equipped to respond to