Posted by Geraldine Johns-Putra - 3 February 2011 - 4.10pm
Last week, China's State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) reportedly granted 7 new Internet mapping licences to enterprises operating in China.
Licensing requirements
Regulations issued by SBSM in May 2010 require online map service providers to be licensed. The deadline for applying for licences has been extended to 31 March 2011, after which unlicensed mapping service providers will be delivered warnings. SBSM says that after 1 July 2011 it will start prosecuting unlicensed operators.
The May 2010 regulations are the Professional Standards for Internet Mapping Services (in Chinese) and stipulate conditions regarding employee numbers, equipment (which must include a China-based map data server), quality management, privacy management and file management. The licences authorise the provision of map-searching services, location tagging services, map downloading and reproduction services and map transmission and referral services. Grade A licence holders can offer all these services, whilst Grade B licence holders can offer only map searching and location tagging services.
In a statement available on the SBSM website until last week, it was reported that the latest licence allocations bring to 38 the number of licences granted under the new regulations.
The first batch of licensees in September 2010 included Baidu, Alibaba, Sina Corp, Tencent and Nokia's Chinese division. The recent round of successful applicants include NYSE listed SouFun Holdings, owner of China's largest real estate portal, and in which Telstra held a 50.5% stake before selling out last year.
Concerns regarding unlicensed online mapping
Advances in GPS, remote sensing, geospatial information systems (GIS) and network communication technologies have fuelled growth in Internet mapping services. With a booming Internet user population, estimated to be 470 million strong, China is no exception. The attraction of a diversified revenue stream and the ability to tag business locations, build custom maps and offer route planning services have seen substantial take-up through Internet and mobile platforms in China.
These observations were outlined in a Q&A statement with Deputy Director of SBSM Mr Song Chaozhi, available in Chinese and posted on the SBSM website. In the statement, Mr Song highlights two concerns of the Chinese government regarding Internet mapping, explaining the need for tighter controls. The first is that some individuals and businesses have a "weak sense of national territory" and, intentionally or not, do not capture all of China's claimed territories within map boundaries. The second relates to national security and ensuring that sensitive data is not uploaded, which could potentially "bring harm to users in serious cases" in addition to damaging the interests of national security.
MapWorld vs Google Earth?
Along with the news of the second round of licences, the SBSM announced a day previous that it had launched the final version of its own free mapping service, called MapWorld, available at www.tianditu.cn in Chinese and English. Trialled in October 2010, MapWorld is apparently positioning itself as a competitor to Google Earth. According to SBSM, MapWorld has 11 million place names including 120,000 points of interests such as hotels, restaurants, retail businesses, government institutions, banks and roads.
Google is not one of the current Internet mapping licence holders and it is not known if Google has applied for a licence.
In March 2010, in a highly publicised move and after citing disquiet about suspected hacking and wide-scale censorship in China, Google began redirecting google.cn search traffic to Google Hong Kong. Three months later, Google reinstated a landing page and a link at google.cn to keep its ISP licence with China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. However, many of its services remain blocked in China.
Google is thought to have lost ground to leading Chinese search engine Baidu after limiting its activities in China. It now also looks to have a new competitor in the form of the Chinese government in providing online mapping and geographical information services.
For more information and for an English translation of the Professional Standards for Internet Mapping Services, please contact Geraldine Johns-Putra.
Partner: Elisabeth Ellis
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