Shi Yuchen, a user of the Chinese personal access system also known as Little Smart, has sued China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology at the Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court for canceling the Little Smart service without a public hearing and has asked the court to withdraw the relevant documents issued by MIIT.
On February 13, 2009, MIIT published a notice, which stated it had decided to withdraw the 1900-1920MHz frequency band, which was previously allocated to the Little Smart service, before the end of 2011. Little Smart is a competitor to the CDMA and GSM services, albeit a much cheaper service that lacks many of the 3G features of CDMA.
Shi says MIIT's notice is a compulsory termination of the telecommunication service contract. He says in the indictment that he started to use the Little Smart service in 2004. With reasonable charges, Little Smart offers basic communication services to low and medium-end users in China. He emphasizes that the fate of a product should be decided by the market instead of the whims of administrative departments. He says MIIT has infringed his use rights over the Little Smart service.
Shi adds that according to the Administrative License Law, a public hearing should be held when deciding major administrative issues. However, MIIT did not inform the users or hold a public hearing, which is an abuse of its market dominating position. Therefore, he asks the court to decide if the document from MIIT as illegal, withdraw the document, and asks the MIIT to hold a public hearing before re-implementing the administrative action.
The Beijing No.1 Intermediate People's Court has reportedly accepted the indictment and will decide whether to put it on record soon.
