China is expected to follow its recent antitrust move against two telecoms operators with similar action in other sectors such as technology, according to legal experts and industry executives.

On November 9 the price supervision and anti-monopoly bureau at the National Development and Reform Commission made the surprise announcement that it was investigating China Telecom and China Unicom, the two state-owned fixed-line carriers, for allegedly abusing their dominant market position to keep competitors out of the broadband business. If found guilty, they face fines of up to 10 per cent of 2010 broadband revenues.

Experts believe probes into other sectors could follow, with implications for a number of big Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong and New York. “It can be seen as a message to the world that this part of the anti-monopoly law is now open,” said Gerry O’Brien, a consultant at Mayer Brown, the law firm, in Hong Kong.

When China first adopted its anti-monopoly law in 2007, foreign lawyers suspected it was unlikely to use the legislation against state enterprises that had a stranglehold on areas of the domestic economy and would instead employ it to block foreign entities from building strong positions in the Chinese market.

Indeed, antitrust regulators have so far been active almost exclusively in scrutinising mergers and acquisitions. The government has reviewed about 300 cases, imposed conditions on seven and vetoed one – the proposed acquisition of Chinese juice maker Huiyuan by Coca-Cola in 2009.

The NDRC’s recent activities could signal a change to all this.

Over the past three years, consumers have raised complaints about alleged unfair pricing by dominant state companies such as Sinopec, the petrochemical group, and China Mobile, the mobile market leader. “We are likely to see regulators take up dominance cases in the technology industry as well,” says Mr O’Brien.

Have abridged last four pars to this:Other potential targets include Baidu, which is thought to account for more than three-quarters of the Chinese online search market. In 2008 a group of small companies claimed Baidu had manipulated its search results not to display their websites after they refused to buy ads on the search engine. Also in regulators’ sights could be companies such as Tencent, Qihoo and Kingsoft, which have often hurled market abuse accusations at each other.