I've yet to understand the beef that New Media Age has with the regulation of mobile content. In the past they've savaged Vodafone for suggesting that adult services should be opted into, rather than opted out of.

The fact that this approach might limit the size of the industry is really beside the point; if you accept that such a code is necessary, that is its purpose. To use an (admittedly emotive) analogy, government health warnings (presumably) cut the number of people smoking, but an argument from tobacco companies that this is reducing their market doesn't make said warnings wrong.

This week, one counter-argument from NMA is that content providers will have to provide different versions of their services for different operators. Well, guess what? Most of them already do, thanks to:

• differing technical standards: all UK operators do billing differently, for example;
• different style guidelines; the visual appearance of a Vodafone live service is completely inappropriate for placement on Orange World, for instance;
• different commercial arrangements; many of our clients sell in slightly different versions of services to different operators, allowing the networks to differentiate themselves from their competition and pick the exact content they want.

Mandating that operators use an identical method for blocking access to adult content will only delay the introduction of such blocks, as operators get together to discuss a method for marking such content which is suitable for all of them. Far better to agree on what needs to be done then let them each implement it appropriately for their own infrastructure.

(Disclaimer: we're working with one operator and content provider to implement controls along these lines)