Your cellular telephone can do anything—almost. With it you can check scores, play video games, take digital photos, record video, read your e-mail, listen to music and much more. But you can’t buy pornography quite as easily as you can check your e-mail.

At least not yet.

The Deseret News reported in September 2005 that entrepreneurs and possibly major wireless carriers in the United States were looking for ways to make pornography available no matter where you are, as long as you have reception. If they are successful, and analysts estimate they will be to the tune of $196 million by 2009, the world of smut will literally follow you wherever you go.

With commercial carriers already providing customers with the hardware and communications technology to view web-based video on full-color screens with increasingly powerful processors, the only obstacles for American carriers to join the global billion-dollar mobile phone pornography industry are moral, and most of those have already crumbled.

Telecommunications providers such as Cingular and Verizon are reluctant to be viewed as facilitators of explicit material in part due to advocacy groups such as the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, which is among the groups that have voiced concern over the issue. According to a Pew study, almost half of teens own cell phones, and a quarter use them to access the Web. The Wall Street Journal reports that websites intended for cell phones are even harder to filter than regular Internet pages. In fact, that is one of the appeals cell phones offer; with their portability comes a feeling of privacy.

Even though the teenage demographic is one of the largest consumers of pornography, corporate disinclination toward the porn industry is showing signs of warming up with so much potential cash left unclaimed. Major cellular phone carriers have already adopted a ratings system that could be used (and is presumably intended) for rating videos and images, allowing these carriers to reap profits from acting as a third-party facilitator of smut.

Pornography was partially responsible for the popularity explosion of the Internet in the ’90s, when, in 1997 for example, 50 percent of web searches were for pornography. The wireless market is equally lucrative, if not more so. If their efforts are as successful as they have been in the Internet arena, you may want to do more for your child than just monitor excessive talk time.

For more information on pornography’s invasive role in popular culture, read “Teens Top Viewers of Child Porn” and “Right to Porn Upheld.”