Telus scraps adult content

Bowing to pressure from customers and facing a boycott spearheaded by Vancouver's Catholic archdiocese, Canadian mobile carrier Telus announced it will terminate the adult content service it quietly launched in January. "[Providing adult content] is not a business our customers want us to be in," Telus director of media relations Jim Johannsson told the Vancouver Sun. "There was a fundamental lack of awareness among the people who called or wrote with concerns that cellphones are web-enabled devices. Parents should take the same precautions about letting children use cellphones as they do with their home computers that are connected to the Internet."

Although Telus registered and age-verified several thousand customers in the weeks following its introduction of adult content, the carrier did little to publicize the service until word of its existence hit the mainstream Canadian media in late January. Hundreds of consumer complaints quickly followed, culminating in the February 19 edition of The B.C. Catholic, a weekly newspaper published by the Vancouver archdiocese that reprimanded Telus for "hitching its financial future to the abuse-ridden and pain-filled pornography industry." The church also instructed about 130 parishes and schools to cancel their Telus contracts.

For more on the Telus controversy:
- read this Vancouver Sun article

Related article:
- Trend: Blocking adult mobile content