China Mobile has suspended billing for all of its WAP services as part of the national crackdown on mobile porn.
The mainland carrier said yesterday it had already shut 626 sites hosting obscene content, including six at China Mobile’s own data centers.
Most of the sites – 478 - were based on servers outside mainland China.
The closures are part of the latest anti-porn campaign, this time targeting WAP sites, which are hugely popular in China’s mostly-2G mobile market. An unnamed official said the WAP sites were the most difficult part of the government’s frequent campaigns against pornography.
“Most internet supervisory bodies do not have equipment to watch over mobile WAP sites, and manual check using mobile phones is rather slow,” the official said.
China Mobile described obscene content as “a kind of cancer on the wireless internet.”
It said some service providers, after signing a billing contract with the carrier, were hiding porn services through “layer upon layer of subcontractors, each of them all able to support mobile porn content sites.”
It said it had suspended billing and payment for all WAP service and content providers while it carried out a comprehensive probe into the names, content and promotion channels of their services and applications.
It also planned to establish “a first line of defense” against mobile porn through the WAP service partners, by “guaranteeing information security” and strictly forbidding the use of subcontracting.
China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou last week said the company had allocated 100 million yuan ($14.7m) for technology defenses against mobile porn.
WAP content provider Kongzhong’s stock fell 7.98% on Nasdaq to 12.98 in the wake of the announcement Monday.