Friday February 5 4:48 AM ET
China To Reduce Expensive Internet Fees -
Paper
BEIJING (Reuters) - China plans to reduce expensive Internet rates this year
to boost the development of the information industry, the official China Daily
said Thursday.
The Ministry of Information Industry has launched a review of data transmission prices, the
newspaper quoted Chang Xiaobin, deputy director of the ministry's telecommunications bureau, as
saying.
Institutional users would get an even lower rate than individuals but there was no specific timetable
for the price cut, it said.
On average, Internet users in Beijing cough up 34.8 percent of their monthly salaries on high fees,
which have been blamed as one of the reasons for the slow development of the information industry,
it said.
One of the major problems of cutting costs was the monopoly that the ministry, price bureaus and
local governments had on fixing fees, the daily said.
While telecom authorities hoped to encourage people to go on-line with lower fees, police stake a
24-hour watch on popular cyber chat rooms to stamp out pro-democracy discussions.
Police clamped down on unlicensed Internet cafes and bars amid a push for greater supervision of
Internet use in China.
In a landmark case in Shanghai, Lin Hai, a 30-year-old computer engineer, was sentenced to two
years in prison for providing e-mail addresses to an overseas dissident organization.
Police have also stepped up their war on hackers, most recently detaining one software designer for
installing a ''logic bomb'' inside two popular educational programs.
There are about two million Internet users in China and some foreign analysts predict that the
number will balloon to 10 million by 2000.
dailynews.yahoo.com |
