By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

Seoul authorities are struggling to keep sexually explicit material off the screens of smartphones.

Regulators and wireless carriers here find themselves having less control over the content supply chain than they did before. Their rules have become toothless as applications slip through their censors and smartphone users gain access to globally-consistent online content platforms.

Smartphones rely on a wealth of software to deliver a variety of functions, including Web browsing, e-mail, multimedia and games, which users download to their mobile devices through the online applications market operated by the handset vendors and wireless carriers.

The Korea Communications Standards Commission (KOCSC) believes that there is too much sex-related material on the Apple App Store, which provides applications for the users of iPhones and iPod Touch multimedia devices.

Whether anything can be done about it is another problem.

The App Store has many sex-related applications and games that can be found by typing in the words ``sex'' or ``nude,'' while racy photos are often found among the applications that can be downloaded for free.

Apple screens the content on the App Store. It has been seeking to purge its content market and remove overtly sexual applications. But the company's view on what qualifies as ``sexually explicit'' doesn't always match that of Korean government officials.

The debut of the Google-backed Android operating system adds more headaches to the Seoul regulators. Android phones have a slew of sex-tinged applications in its online content platform called Android Market.

``We didn't have the chance to review all of them but many of the contents on the App Store would obviously fall in the category of lewd content by our standards,'' said Seo Jung-won, a KOSCS official.

He noted that swimsuit photos or ``semi-nude'' images are among the content that would be rated as ``harmful to youth'' here, although some other countries appear to be a little more tolerant of them.

The KOCSC is also in talks with wireless carriers SK Telecom and KT, which combine to control more than 80 percent of the country's mobile telephony customers, for developing programs to filter the content delivered to underage mobile users, he said.

``At least for paid content, you have a defense in credit card verification, but some of the sexually suggestive content is currently provided among the free applications, leaving teenagers with the ability to download them. We are talking with foreign companies like Apple and Google to come up with a screening process for smartphone content. But it is difficult for us to keep track of the massive flow of applications flushed through the gates every day,'' he said.

The debate over what Korean government officials claim are excessively sexual smartphone applications add to the argument that the country's censorship rules are being rendered irrelevant in the era of the mobile Internet.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr