China's regulations to weed out user-generated maps

With China requiring online maps providers to operate under licenses this month, crowd-sourced maps and Google's own online product may soon face elimination in the market, says an analyst.

According to reports, the country's State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping announced last month that it would start issuing licenses to Internet maps providers in the country.

Charice Wang, an analyst with Ovum's telecom regulation team, noted that the maps are also expected to be hosted on servers based in China. This means Google, which provides a maps service in the country but which recently moved its search service to Hong Kong after a dispute with the Chinese government, may be forced to stop including maps of China in its Google Maps service, she noted.

The new rule mandating all Internet maps to be stored in the country may be difficult for Google to accept, coming on top of its ongoing strike in the country, said Wang.

But the search giant may have to back down and accept the new Chinese regulations if it values its place in the Chinese mapping market, she added.

The Chinese Bureau has also extended the restrictions to include maps provided on mobile devices, in addition to PC browsers. This is in line with efforts started last year by the government to crack down on unauthorized leaks of sensitive government data within maps online.

Wang said this is expected to mostly impact the many crowd-sourced maps on sites such as lifestyle and travel Web sites. The government, already accustomed to practicing censorship online, has been mostly concerned with such user-generated maps, including military information and state secrets within their sites, she said.

There have been as many as 42,000 user-generated maps in the country. A rise in GPS-enabled mobile devices has also made it easier for more users to contribute location-based data to these services, said the analyst.

"Many blogs and online forums will remove user-generated maps under the new regulation," she said.

The parties likely to benefit from the regulation would be large Web properties carrying maps such as Baidu and Sogou, as well as Google rival, Microsoft, which provides a maps service under its Bing name.

"These might all increase their market share if Google closes its mapping service in mainland China," said Wang.

Rather than brand this a censorship exercise, the Chinese government has said in reports that this is an effort to regulate the quality of maps online and to promote "orderly development" of Chinese maps services.