New Provisions to Assess Security of Online News Services

On October 30, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released Provisions on Security Assessment of New Technologies and Applications in Internet News Information Services in line with the Cybersecurity Law and the Provisions on the Administration of Internet News Information Services released by CAC earlier this May. The provisions will be effective on December 1, 2017.
 
According to the Provisions, “new technologies and applications in Internet news information services” are subject to security assessment, which will be conducted by service providers first and further reviewed by the respective supervisory government agencies of the service providers'. The “new technologies and applications in Internet news information services”, as explained in a Q&A document released by CAC, has a broad coverage and includes news website, applications, forums, BBS, blog, micro-blog, public account, instant messages, live video streaming, and other innovative applications with news attributes and social mobilization capability and its supporting technologies.

Although control over news content is not new, the review of the technologies or application delivering the news is relatively nascent.