The Editor
South China Morning Post



Dear Editor,

I write to express grave concern about the gross distortion of our policy on Internet services in your article entitled "Licence change bans adverts -- Internet users face vetting of e-mail" dated 11 March 1996, and the unnecessary alarm that it might possibly have brought about.

The said article has referred to a "change" in the licence conditions which would purportedly "force [the Internet Service Providers (ISPs)] to start vetting their customers' electronic mail activities for the first time".

In fact, the licence condition in question, which stipulates that "The licensee shall not use the service, and shall endeavour to prevent the service from being used by any user, for the transmission of messages comprised in any part of unsolicited advertising or promotional information", reflects a long standing policy of the Telecommunications Authority (TA) with regard to telecommunications services which are vulnerable to abusive and intrusive use that may put the consumers at a disadvantaged position, an obvious example being junk fax. Similar conditions appear in all Radio Paging System and Public Radio-communication Service licences, and was introduced last year into the Public Non-Exclusive Telecommunications Services (or PNETS) licence held by ISPs).

The primary aim of the condition is to stop the service providers themselves from forcing their customers to receive unsolicited messages for advertising purposes. We expect that the licensees recognise their rights and obligations as service providers, and we wish to prevent any abusive use of such rights. More particularly, we wish to prevent the unauthorised use of the customer information and data they possess. The licence condition in question makes it clear that service providers cannot provide unsolicited advertisements as part of the service they are providing to their customers.

We also expect the licensees to cooperate in preventing the service from being abused by some users. This does NOT mean requesting them to "vet" private electronic mails, which they are not entitled to do, but rather provides them with a basis for taking action on abusive users when necessary. In actual practice this will probably mean that the ISPs would use reasonable endeavour to act on complaints and curb further massive transmission of junk messages, in very much the same way as complaints on junk fax are currently being dealt with by OFTA in coordination with the telephone companies. Those who had been victims of large volumes of junk fax and nuisance calls would no doubt agree that regulations of this kind are necessary and condusive to the productive and healthy use of telecommunications services.

Also contrary to what was suggested in the article, we have NOT made it "impossible to put advertisements on World-Wide Web pages". Anyone with some knowledge of the Internet would realise that World-Wide Web pages could only be "opened" by users who choose to read the web pages themselves. In such circumstances, the advertisements can hardly be referred to as "unsolicited". We are aware of the potentials of the Internet as an effective advertising medium, and promotional materials, so far as they are not being imposed on internet users as unsolicited messages, are clearly outside the scope of the above-mentioned licence condition.

I wish to reiterate that we are working to protect telecommunication service users from the harrassment of nuisance messages, and we look upon this as the duty of ourselves as well as the service providers and all users of public telecommunication services. It is regrettable that this intention has been misrepresented as a call for censorship, and I look to your assistance in clarifying our policy to readers who might have been misguided by the ungrounded statements in the said article.

Yours sincerely






(A S K Wong)
Director-General of Telecommunications
(Acting)