ChristianWeek

SURREY, BC—Five months ago, Christian businessman Gordon Keast would never have predicted that his outrage over Telus offering online “adult content” to cellphone subscribers like himself would turn him into an anti-pornography activist.

“It was all about me: ‘How could they do that to my phone?’” he says. “To be honest, I had absolutely no idea that there was this side to their business—or Bell’s business, or any of them. I didn’t know....But now that I know, it’s hard to just ignore it.”

Keast was especially disturbed that children with a web-enhanced cellphone could be viewing and sharing porn.

He responded by suing Telus, Canada’s secondlargest telecommunications company, for $300 in damages in small claims court—a suit he refused to drop even after a national public outcry forced Telus to hastily abandon its new service.

But by mid-May, after a judge had told him he had no hope of winning his case, Keast decided it was time to move on.

“I accomplished what I set out to do in February,” he says. “Telus stopped what they were doing, and I was a little part of that....Now is there anything else we can do?”

“There are laws about the distribution of pornography to children and underage minors,” he adds. “So I may be naïve, but why is it being allowed on cell-phones?”

Keast began partnering with Beyond Borders, a Winnipeg-based children’s rights group. “We’re delighted to have somebody really inform us [on this issue],” says president Roz Prober. “We would be negligent if we allowed it to continue.”

According to Keast, there are upwards of 250 million pages of pornography on the internet as well as possibly millions of mostly unblocked child porn sites—all accessible by the estimated 45 per cent of North American teens who now have cell-phones.

But what is not yet clear to either Keast or Prober is how to correct the problem in a way that would not run afoul of charter rights on freedom of expression, for example.

For its part, Canada’s internet industry believes it is addressing the issue. About 10 months ago, a committee representing more than two dozen wireless ser- vice providers began work on guidelines for rating all internet content.

“It’s a complicated effort,” says Marc Choma, spokesman for the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, who also points out parents are not powerless to control their children’s cell-phone usage.

“If you did not want to have your mobile browser activated on your cell phone, you don’t have to,” he says. “The carriers have a system as well where you can...choose what services and even when someone is allowed to make calls or access particular services.”

Prober counters that placing such a heavy onus on parents is “unfortunately irresponsible.”

“We have to acknowledge,” she says, “that there’s all sorts of parents—parents who are absolutely wonderful but who on the technological side just aren’t up to speed on child protection, to parents who are just negligent.”

Prober believes the only solution is federal legislation in which “the bar [protecting children from pornography] is set very high.”

A lawyer with Beyond Borders is currently reviewing a bill now before the United States Senate—Cyber Safety For Kids Act—to see if it could be adapted to Canada.

It would require website operators to flag pages containing material that could harm children, and empower authorities to ensure adult sites have secure log-ins, age-identification requirements and “clean” home pages. Violators would be subject to fines.

Several previous attempts by U.S. lawmakers to control online pornography have all been struck down in court. This latest attempt as well, Keast admits, “may be doomed to failure, but at least these politicians are looking for solutions.

“If we just stand and do nothing, nothing gets better.”