CYBERSPACE – Search engine giant Google’s plan to offer an electronic payment service is fueling speculation that Google may enter the adult internet space as a payment processing option.Rumors that Google was working on an online payment system surfaced last month, according to Wired.com, leading to the obvious question of whether Google would get involved in the controversial, but lucrative, online adult entertainment payment processing business.

The prospect of Google opening an adult-friendly micropayment system is an attractive one for the adult industry, especially with PayPal having dropped processing of adult entertainment related payments when they were purchased by Ebay 3 years ago.

“It’s going to be a very tempting proposition for Google to pick up where PayPal left off,” said Andy Beal, vice president of the search engine marketing firm WebSourced, in an interview with Wired.com.

For the moment, Google will only confirm that it is “working on things in e-commerce,” as Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in a written statement to Wired.com, but added they do not intend to offer a PayPal type system.

Regardless of what manner of payment system Google develops, the question of whether they would enter the adult space is another issue altogether. As a publicly traded entity, Google may be hesitant to get involved in the controversial and “high risk” adult market and risk running afoul of their own internal policies and best practices (see Google’s “Corporate Info” page at http://www.google.com/corporate/tenthings.html for more detail on their central operating principles).

In other words, as Beal commented to Wired.com, “There’s a big can of worms that could be opened.”

Both CCBill and Paycom declined to comment for this story.