State-owned China Mobile is working with the government on a “walled garden” approach to blocking websites unsuitable for children, and setting up a whitelist of sites that are permitted.

It will be China’s largest acknowledged web-filtering project – an internet content filter that is being built by China Mobile, the country’s biggest mobile telco, in cooperation with the Communist Youth League. The internet whitelist for minors will first run in several pilot areas as early as this October.

The walled garden approach will only allow certain websites to be viewed once the child/minors filter is activated on a computer, phone, or modem – thereby only loading up preordained animation, video and general educational sites that are ostensibly fit for an under-16 audience. The content filter is believed to redirect web traffic via a VPN gateway, that funnels the data along this child-friendly path.

Today’s news comes from state press agency Xinhua, who points out that there will be channels of accountability in this child-oriented web-filtering system: with “accrediting bodies” implementing “content standards” on sites, in a manner similar to film ratings. In addition to websites, it will likely also block traffic to online multi-player games that are very popular with China’s youngsters, such as World of Warcraft.

At the moment it’s not clear if this might extend to China’s biggest home broadband supplier, China Telecom.