?ccording to yesterday’s International Herald Tribune Vodafone, Orange and O2 are trying to figure out how to make money from porn without looking irresponsible.

They are trying to set it up so that they can guarantee that minors are fenced off from adult material. That, they think, will make it OK.

Unfortunately, it won’t. There’s no way of getting around it. Pornography is a seedy business. It’s very difficult to maintain a clean image and be involved with it in any substantial way. The financial markets in Europe and the US might not take immediate offence, but certain elements of the marketplace will. For example, an association with a porno company will definitely be an obstacle for a mobile company if it is bidding for a 3G licence in a Muslim country (or even in some Christian countries).

It could also cause public upset. Look at what happened to Bank of Ireland, a high street Irish financial institution which got involved in a deal to purchase a chain of porn magazines in the UK.

What will Vodafone do if it turns out that some of the models it features in its highly profitable ‘risque’ offering turn out to be drug addicts, prostitutes, illegal immigrants or child abuse victims? It is very hard for a corporate to guarantee everything its vendors do is above-board and it will be difficult to counter the image of Vodafone profiting from the misery of others.

Now, I’m not naive enough to think that porn isn’t going to be part of the drive toward 3G technology. It’s inevitable that any new medium will get exploited for this purpose. Every other medium invented so far (print, electronic, Internet) has been.

So what should the mobile operators do? Well, if I were Vodafone or Orange, I would stick to the business of providing data services, and facilitating content providers by integrating with payment sytems. They should provide these services on a ‘common carrier’ basis – providing the same facility for all content providers regardless of what their content actually is -. (Of course, there would be no obligation to allow content providers to send anything illegal over the network.)

They should stay well clear of the porn business itself. It should be up to content providers to decide what they want to sell to customers, and how they want to market and restrict it. The content providers will get the bulk of the revenue, but they will also take the risk of developing and marketing more innovative, more competitively priced content. They will also be responsible if the public reacts negatively to a particular type of content. The networks will benefit from increased data traffic and transaction fees.

But this isn’t what the mobile operators will do, at least not the big ones. The mobile companies like to control as much of the content and the revenue as possible.

This strategy could prove to be their undoing in providing porn services.