EU united in effort

Reding said that 26 of 27 EU countries, representing 97 percent of mobile users in the European Union, have agreed to a framework that targets these goals.

Ehrlich said GSMA members, as well as members of Toure's ITU, are collaborating with governments in Europe, Asia and Africa to identify child pornography Web sites and pursue their hosts, while implementing "Notice and Take Down" orders for Internet providers that carry such sites. Hotlines will be established so that consumers can report child sexual abuse content, he said.

Toure emphasized the importance of fighting crimes against children without regard to national borders, noting that criminals in cyberspace have access to tools that allow them "higher scale and greater speed" in disseminating child pornography than ever before. And the criminal, he said, "no longer has to be on the crime scene."

"We need to have a global alliance—a harmonized regulatory and legal framework to assure technical readiness everywhere on the planet, because the criminal always applies the highest effort at the weakest point," he said.

Addressing that "weakest point," the GSMA and its partners conceded that laws establishing the illegality of child pornography are not universal. Although reluctant to name the countries, Toure said some "developing countries" have simply failed to codify these offenses as specific crimes, thus allowing purveyors of child pornography to use these countries as safe havens.

"We need these countries to re-assess their laws and priorities," he said.

However, Toure added that there is no safe haven in a world where a government supports child sexual abuse, either politically or philosophically. "This is one crime where there are no differences in ideology," he said.

Ehrlich added, "There are no two sides to this issue. In talking about child pornography, I'm not aware of a country or culture that would say this is a good thing. It's evil."

The flip side of the GSMA's effort, posed by several questions at the GSMA press conference, is the danger of applying laws against child pornography so broadly that they serve to censor all sexual content on the Web, the vast majority of which is legal. Toure said the GSMA and the ITU had considered this problem. "We condemn countries when they do cut off their citizens from any information for ideological reasons," he stated. "The good part of the information society should not be blocked by the bad side of it."