As the Internet has been up an running in China for 10 years, the government said it will use legal measures to create a favourable environment for the prosperity of the industry in coming years, senior officials said yesterday at the Internet 2004 conference in Beijing.

"Stable and favourable policies were big factors in the fast progress of the Internet industry in China in the past 10 years. Its prosperity in the future also needs a favourable political environment," said Xi Guohua, vice-minister of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII).

He said that by the end of June, there were 9,046 Internet value-added content providers in the country, rising 32 per cent over the end of last year.

China has become the second largest country in terms of Internet population and Chinese Internet companies including Sina Corp and Alibaba.com are already among the top Internet businesses in the world.

Su Jinsheng, director-general of the bureau of telecommunications administration of the MII, said his ministry will reduce restrictions on market access, and draft regulations on security administration and the establishment of an online credit system.

He said the MII will improve the market access mechanism of telecom value-added services including Internet-based services and make them more convenient for applicants.

For services which need improvement in quality and security, the government should allow service providers to conduct trials first, such as virtual professional network service, a telecom value-added service based on Internet technology.

Su said the MII is also drafting regulations on Internet protocol (IP) address registration, spam e-mail, and telecommunications messaging services to curb disruptive Internet-based viruses, spam e-mail, the spread of pornography, and cheats on telecommunications messaging services on the Internet and telecom users.

By August 23, Chinese Internet users had filed 54,000 complaints to the illegal and bad information complaint centre and 95 per cent of them were about pornographic content.

The Chinese Government closed almost 700 pornographic websites in July and punished several mobile service providers which helped them charge users.

Besides cleaning up the content on the Internet, the Ministry of Information Industry will also take moves to upgrade Internet infrastructures to provide access for more Internet users.

Su said the ministry will study the possibility of building a national access point to boost the exchange speed of local networks.

The country, troubled by a shortage of top-level domain names, will also speed up the establishment of a mirror of a root domain name so that users can access websites without sending requests to domain name servers in the United States.

(China Daily September 2, 2004)