According to China Communications, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China is planning to reclaim its right to monitor telecommunications service providers' marketing activities.
MIIT says that the ministry attaches great importance to the wireless value-added service provider market and its relevant departments will directly connect with service providers to enhance its monitoring strength over their marketing activities.
In the past, the Ministry of Information Industry, which recently morphed into MIIT, was mostly responsible for setting up regulations for the management of the service provider sector and it did not implement detailed management or monitoring of service providers' marketing activities. The management right was given to telecom operators and these operators would launch their own enforcement regulations. However, because of the financial interest between operators and service providers, the supervision strength over the service providers was often questioned.
Statistics from MIIT show that in the first quarter of 2008, consumers' complaints about the controversial charges of service providers account for 19.98% of the total complaints. Although the ratio decreased slightly, the absolute quantity of the complaints increased greatly. Of which, the increase rate of complaints that involved China Mobile's service providers was over 30%. The situation became so bad a couple years ago that companies like Sohu.com, Sina.co, Netease.com, KongZhong, Linktone, and Hurray were fined and part of their respective operations were shutdown in China.