14 DAY TRIAL // Telus introduced its pay-per-download porn distributing service on January the 8th this year. Customers were able to download adult content on their mobile phones, for $3 an image or $4 a video.
Since then, the service has registered and age-verified several thousand customers. While some mobile operators started to limit any type of adult content, for the moment, Telus started embracing it, because frankly, where there's porn involved, someone will most definitely be making a lot of money.
Well, now Telus have been somewhat forced to back off from the idea of providing their customers with such a service after receiving several hundred complaints and a number of service cancellations. In the end, Telus decided it would be best to discontinue the service.
"Some of our corporate customers, too, have called to try and understand the direction we were going," Telus director of media relations Jim Johannsson said. Telus will make no formal announcement of this decision.
Apparently, Vancouver's Catholic archdiocese told about 130 parishes and schools to give up their Telus Mobility contracts and seek out a pornography-free mobile phone service provider. Moreover, the church put up quite a fight against pornography with a 12-page special section in the B.C. Catholic, a weekly newspaper published by Vancouver archdiocese. Why? Because apparently, Telus was "hitching its financial future to the abuse-ridden and pain-filled pornography industry."
Responding to their customers' demands, Telus is now no longer offering porn. Since 90 percent of today's mobile phones are web-enabled, users are naturally able to access whatever content they want, with Telus' service or not, including sexually explicit material. Johansson pointed out that the content provided by Telus included images of partial or full nudity and not sex acts.
"There was a fundamental lack of awareness among the people who called or wrote with concerns that cellphones are Web-enabled devices," Johannsson said. "Parents should take the same precautions about letting children use cellphones as they do with their home computers that are connected to the Internet."