According to Sina Tech, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has ordered Chinese telecom operators to take measures to eliminate spam text messages. The news is sure to come as a blow to mobile users who enjoy paying for unsolicited, irrelevant ads that wake them up at three in the morning — in other words, no one. But it shouldn’t come as a big surprise given that the issue of spam texts has been in the news for a while and was most recently shouted about during the National People’s Congress, a “democratically elected” legislative body that meets once a year to catch up on their sleep er, stamp some documents.
Specifically, telecoms have been told to go after spam texts in two ways, both by cutting them off at the source and by implementing a filtration system that would eliminate them on the user end. Exactly how this will work is still unclear, and it may vary by telecom, but it appears there’s a chance it may involve a whitelist for anyone wishing to send massive group texts. The MIIT order also instructs telecoms to form groups at the provincial and city levels to manage the day-to-day business of cleaning up spam texts.
The MIIT-led nationwide anti-spam-text campaign will last three months, at the end of which spam texts will have hopefully be vanquished forever so we can all get some sleep and MIIT can go back to its usual work delaying the launch of Apple devices and funding incredibly pointless studies. Huzzah!
[MIIT via Sina Tech]
