Though nowhere now in comparable muscle power with the US and the BRICS, it is nice to see UK Inc. providing ethical leadership against the scourge of pornography. Four of her top internet service providers, BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin, have announced protection against porn for smartphones, laptops and PCs.

New measures will be launched by David Cameron on Tuesday under Parentport, a website to help British parents complain about inappropriate content. Tools that limit what children can see and do online are available already, but so far they haven’t been offered to customers as they sign up.

Corporates and Cameron are reacting to a sophisticated report on the taboo industry, last reliably estimated by Gail Dines in her book Pornland, way back in 2006, at $96bn (£61bn), riding 13,000 films released annually, and 420m internet porn pages, 4.2m porn websites and 68m search engine requests daily. (One could argue that the industry has contracted, as there’s more porn available for free, but there’s conflicting evidence of paid porn now seamlessly and perhaps more discretely accessible via smartphones).

The new ideas can be accessed in the Bailey Report, commissioned by the Ministry of Children and Families, named so after its principal author, Reg Bailey. Besides impacting four internet biggies, Bailey goes beyond just internet pornography. There’s (www.tinyurl.com/baileyreport) stuff involving various stakeholders, publishers, distributers, retailer associations behind magazines with racy covers, where he suggests that the group provide ‘modesty covers’ and ‘modesty stands,’ to all display outlets.

Bailey also takes a shot at risqué music videos, children selling to children, and obscene on-street advertising, through relevant-area-self-regulation and parental action. For pre-watershed timings of programmes on television, he suggests parental concerns are given wider play than those of the audience at large.

Britain’s telecom regulator, Ofcom, is backing that. “Seven UK media regulators have come together to develop a single website, with a single aim to help protect children from inappropriate material. Each regulator is committed to helping parents make their views and concerns known.”

I wonder if such concerns are alien to India. Just a month back, our help’s eight-year-old son was reported watching inappropriate content on his father’s phone.

In all likelihood, the video came though the telecom. I doubt if lakhs like the busted child’s parents, buying a connection each month, would use an Indian Parentport. But acknowledging the problem is perhaps the first step in trying to solve it.

Even in the UK, the debate is far from clinched. It’s balanced between the need to safeguard children versus those who swing on the two extremes, to use Cameron’s words: “try and wrap children up in cotton wool or simply throw (their) hands up and accept the world as it is.’’

There’s obviously the sinister side of moral policing. There’s the imprecision involved in filtering out certain websites. Overzealous parents may end up blocking all or no websites within a broad category. The recent launch of .xxx domain, and if just half-the-junta migrates, is a case in point.

Related to that, trust the porn addict to find ways get past the filter anyway!

As the Economist noted just this month, big changes are afoot in the global adult entertainment business. India is part of it. Old-style ‘pornocrats’ are struggling. Private Media Group, an adult company listed on NASDAQ, has fallen from $10 five years ago to less than 70 cents.

Subscription is flaccid and erotic DVDs are down by 70 per cent in the past five years, said Steven Hirsch, the founder of Vivid Entertainment, described by the newspaper as ‘something of a Bill Gates of porn.’ Celebrity sex tapes and pornographic parodies are Hirsch’s next bet. Meanwhile, Hustler and Playboy have chosen to diversify.

Playboy rides on consumer-goods worldwide, Hustler its pretty dollars from a casino in Los Angeles. As mobile platforms get more sophisticated, all these guys will have figured out the best length for free teasers: long enough to raise the user’s interest, but not too long either. “Cam sites”, whose live sex chats benefit from interactivity, would push back too. Clearly, internet/mobile porn is the future (challenge).

(Email: rohitbansal@post.harvard.edu. The columnist is CEO and Co-Founder, India Strategy Group, Hammurabi & Solomon Consulting LLP).