Technology for using an open mobile alliance (OMA) management object (MO) for congestion control in mobile networks is described. A novel type of OMA MO for application specific access control (ASAC) can include internet protocol (IP) flow descriptions that can be used to characterize applications with fine granularity. Priorities can be assigned to IP flows based on the IP flow descriptions. A user equipment (UE) can receive such an OMA MO and also receive application-barring information regarding a congestion level in a mobile network with which an application at the UE wishes to connect. The UE can have a connectivity manager (CM) that determines whether to allow the application to establish a connection with the mobile network based on the priority level of the application's associated IP flow and the application-barring information.