3G: naughty or nice? PhoneErotica.com generates over 300 million hits per month, and rings up more minutes of use per month than MSN

There is an axiom in technology circles that porn drives technology usage. Pick a category--VHS, video rentals, premium cable, pay-per-view, CD-ROMs, PC games, the Web, chat rooms, broadband, online shopping, etc. Porn has been given credit for the rapid growth of just about all of them. Even VOD owes what little success it's had to naughty content.




Porn's track record as a tech driver has come up again as more new technologies start cropping up. HDTV is one example, although as Wired columnist Brendan I. Koerner once pointed out, porn is a genre where high-def may work against it.

The other big example is next-gen cellular, now that color-screen handsets are mainstream and 3G services are popping up around the world. Many 2.5G operators already offer adult comtent in some form or another, and 3G operators are following suit. Hutchison, for example, has an arrangement with Playboy, which now licenses content to cellcos in well over a dozen countries.



For all the buzz over wireless porn, however, skepticism abounds, and with good reason. Several of them, actually.



The first, of course, is the morality issue. Even in markets where porn is more socially acceptable, like the US, it's still a bugaboo for many cellcos that don't want the bad publicity that anti-porn groups will give them for carrying it. In Australia, Optus is currently in hot water over the revelation of its involvement in a deal several years ago to host porn content and generate international porn traffic for porn company Gilman via Vanuatu--not exactly the publicity it was hoping for with plans to launch mobile adult content services this year.