To charge, or not to charge Weixin users

Tencent's over-the-top (OTT) content service WeChat (or Weixin in Chinese), free and most popular mobile application in China, seems to be in trouble. Rumors have it that China's monopolistic telecom service providers are working out a plan to impose charges on the use of Weixin, with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology saying "it is possible that telecom operators will be allowed to impose fees on WeChat for signaling channel usage".

The telecom service providers say Tencent should pay for taking up bandwidth and generating excessive data flows for the applications it has developed and operates, which sometimes cause traffic jams on the Internet highway.

Given the huge number of Weixin users (about 300 million), complaints against the three State-owned telecom giants have been rising not least because of their poor service and hidden charges. The common streak of the complaints is: Since customers have already paid telecom operators for the data volume needed to chat (through text or voice), why should they be charged a second time if telecom service providers are eventually allowed to collect fees on the use of Weixin?