Porn peddlers go mobile

• Source: Global Times
• [05:24 November 20 2009]
• Comments

Sources with the Ministry of Public Security said mobile porn is hard to track down, as it is always spread through servers outside the country in a concealed way.

"Law enforcement officials have to spend at least one month tracking down a porn website after it goes online," Shi Xiansheng, assistant secretary-general of the Internet Society of China, told the Xinhua News Agency.

And a month is more than long enough for such websites to earn a lot of money, Shi said.

Shanghai police arrested a mobile porn provider earlier this year. The man, surnamed Sheng, had opened more than 40 websites since 2005, earning more than 1 million yuan, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Tao Hongkai, a professor at Huazhong Normal University and expert on online game addiction, told the Global Times that government organizations are facing stiffer challenges in containing the spread of online obscene content in a 3G age, where cutting-edge technologies are updated in the blink of an eye.

"It's impossible to uproot all this obscene content overnight, but it's never too late to rate the content so that content unsuitable to teenagers can be filtered," he said.

Since January of this year, a group of 13 Chinese government departments, including the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Culture, have been busy with an anti-pornography campaign.

As part of the campaign, authorities have shut down 1,250 websites and deleted more than 3.2 million items of online information containing porn and vulgar content, Xinhua reported.

So far, 41 people have been detained for "promulgating porn online," the agency re-ported.

Song Shengxia contributed to this story