THE STATE ADMINISTRATION for Industry and Commerce has vowed to crack down on illegal advertisements on the internet and in apps. Thepaper.cn commented on Wednesday:

The app advertising industry has remained largely unmonitored until now, carrying all kinds of advertisements, from healthcare products to financial products, some of which are suspected of engaging in crooked promotions and providing misleading, or even wrong, information, and some violate the public order and social norms.

Now, for the first time, the SAIC has targeted mobile internet advertisements.
Some app writers openly publish advertorials without verifying the authenticity of the products and services they are paid to promote, and they do no inform their readers they are being paid to write about the products and services concerned.

At the same time, the online search engines list results not according to their pertinence and relevance to the search query, but by the advertisement revenue they receive, which has caused great trouble for the users.

According to the SAIC, among the cases of illegal advertisements it processed last year, 14,904 were online, more than the total number of cases involving outdoor and printed material advertisements.

To put the huge number of online advertisement under supervision, the SAIC needs to strengthen its monitoring capacity by working with the other professional agencies. The National Advertisement Monitoring Center under it, which was launched in September, only supervises 1,004 key websites and four online advertising alliances and e-commerce platforms.

Before acquiring the necessary capacity, it is advisable to put the app counts that are most popular among advertisers in the cross hairs of targeted supervision first.

Although there are no laws about the advertisements on the mobile internet, it does not mean the smartphones can be an outlawed enclave for advertisements that are suspected of violating the Advertisement Law.