YNOT – Busily engaged in sanitizing the internet since January, Chinese officials on Wednesday called for additional effort to eradicate porn on high-speed mobile data networks.China issued third-generation (3G) licenses to the country’s three mobile carriers early this year, and the speed with which the companies deployed new services and attracted new users thereafter has been a source of pride for the People’s Republic. However, drawbacks to the increased speed of the networks recently became apparent: The internet pornography and other “unapproved” material officials virtually eliminated by closing thousands of websites and arresting hundreds of people is easy to transmit among mobile phones.

“Lawless people have begun using the full commercial deployment of 3G and its faster download speeds for pictures and videos… to spread obscene and pornographic content,” Su Jinsheng, an engineer in China’s IT ministry, said in a speech posted on the ministry’s website. The government now must turn its attention to cleaning up the mobile airwaves in order to “protect the healthy growth of the next generation and purify the social environment.”

The Chinese government for decades has made no secret of its desire to play an important role in the global economy and expand its grasp on technology. Although the country lagged behind most of the rest of the world in adopting 3G mobile services, when it joined the party, it did so in a big way. Unfortunately, censors were not prepared for the nuances of the mobile Web, so owners of mobile porn sites have had no difficulty in avoiding official action by taking such simple steps as frequently switching domain names and IP addresses. Blacklists and content filtering software are under development to help carrier decks block inappropriate material.

China’s information cleanup began Jan. 1 with a dictate from the Culture Ministry. Pornography and speech critical of official policy were the first targets, followed in July by bans on sex-related and medical research sites as well as video games that promote drug use, “obscenity,” gambling or crimes such as rape, vandalism and theft. In August, authorities embarked upon a campaign targeting foreign Web hosts, websites and payment processors who provide services to purveyors of banned materials.

In late October, the crackdown expunged thousands of works of literature from the Web, saying the material “included pornographic content,” “used provocative or privacy violating titles to draw attention” or “blatantly talked about one-night stands, wife swapping, sex abuses and violence that disregarded common decency.”