HANOI - As Internet usage grows in Vietnam, fostering a vibrant community of
bloggers, the government is looking at ways to regulate blogs, particularly
those that tend to be political rather than personal.
Although blogging regulations have been discussed before, the issue came to
prominence in November with reports running in local media that the Ministry of
Information and Communications was planning a law which would counteract
"incorrect information" about Vietnam.
Internet providers Yahoo and Google were publicly asked to
assist. Yahoo has a representative office in Vietnam and its Yahoo 360 blogging
service, in the Vietnamese language, is hugely popular.
"The blogs represent a threat to the regime in that they can develop into a
grassroots movement of public opinion, which cannot be easily controlled, as is
the case with the state-owned press," Stephen Denney of Berkeley University
told Inter Press Service (IPS) via e-mail. Denney runs the Vietnam Human Rights
Journal blog, which he sporadically updates and which is not blocked in
Vietnam.
Many bloggers say they are happy sticking to the personal. "I think mostly
people just treat it [blogging] as an online diary," Nguyen Anh Hung told IPS
in a telephone interview. "All of my friends are doing that right now."
Though still a university student, Hung is active in Ho Chi Minh City's
information technology (IT) community, and blogs about technology in English.
He agrees with the official line, but is skeptical about enforcement. "There
are 1.5 million blogs in Vietnam, how can they censor them all? The government
just tries to keep things under control.''
Whereas once information came mainly from state-run papers and scratchy speaker
announcements broadcast through the neighborhood, preceded by a tinny rendition
of the national anthem, these days information is a click away.
Some 20 million of Vietnam's 84 million citizens use the Internet. Cheap
Internet cafes are common in both city alleyways and countryside towns. By
2010, the government aims to have 30 million people online, a target many agree
is reachable.
Vietnam's international bandwidth is 30 gigabytes per second. "Internet usage
continues to grow," Chris Harvey, who gives regular seminars on the IT business
and is the general director of Vietnam Works, said. "Vietnam has one of the
highest penetration rates in the region."
The government has pushed Internet usage and harnessed its power to reach out
to citizens. Last year, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, considered a reformer,
conducted an unprecedented online dialogue, answering some 113 questions from
people.
In October the same year, Vietnam was rocked by its first Internet-spread
celebrity sex film, featuring camera-phone footage of actress Hoang Thuy Linh,
star of the teenage morality soap Van Anh's Diaries. Four university
students were given suspended sentences for its dissemination.
But despite local media making occasional worried noises about the new
prevalence of sex blogs, many see the government's real interest in restricting
political and news-centered blogs.
Recently, blogger Dieu Cay (real name Nguyen Van Hai) was convicted of tax
evasion and sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison. The international
media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said the ruling was aimed at
persecuting the blogger - who has written on the sensitive Spratly and Paracel
Islands issue. The ownership of the islands is disputed by Vietnam and China.
Vietnam has hundreds of newspapers, all state-controlled. In May this year, two
Vietnamese journalists were arrested for their reporting of the "PMU 18" case,
involving high-level government officials gambling millions of dollars of
foreign donor money on football matches. Both were sentenced in October.
Already some officials have gone on record as saying the Ministry of
Information and Communications' draft regulation is unworkable, hinting that
the way forward may involve more peer-to-peer censorship and reporting. Those
found defying regulations may face up to 12 years in prison.
Though local service providers are already subject to stricter controls than
more popular foreign providers, the Vietnamese government has publicly asked
both Yahoo and Google for cooperation.
"We need to see what is in the regulation. We need more information," said Vu
Minh Tri, director general of Yahoo Vietnam. He added Yahoo 360 had a complaint
function and posts which do not comply with user policy are reviewed and
deleted. Yahoo was excoriated in the US Senate last year for providing details
of dissident Chinese bloggers to the Chinese government.
Kevin Miller, a United States web consultant who also blogs on IT issues in
Vietnam and runs the tech "un-conference" BarCamp Saigon, thinks that Yahoo and
Google may use their China experience as something of a test run. "IT is a very
lucrative market in Vietnam. It's all going to depend on how much Yahoo and
Google can get in return."
As yet, Google has little real presence in Vietnam. Apart from a representative
office and a few products tailored for the Vietnamese market, the servers are
hosted in Singapore. Yahoo was in trouble this year for conducting business in
Vietnam without the proper permits.
Foreign-hosted blog sites such as Blogspot have reported filtering before, and
sites championing democracy in Vietnam, human rights, religion or pornography
are sometimes filtered. But compared to nearby China, much still gets through.
"Sometimes it depends on the Internet provider. It's not consistent. A lot of
it depends where you're located," continued Miller.
And if the servers are located overseas, then bloggers will likely continue
posting online, and simply begin a new blog when theirs is blocked.
Blogger "Zero" agrees. Though he too says he agrees with the proposed law,
arguing, "It will protect Vietnam from sex and politics," he admits to being a
fan of tacke.com, a Yahoo 360-hosted blog full of news on corruption and
scandal in Vietnam.
Recently, pictures of hundreds of Catholics protesting the sentencing of eight
Catholics over an ongoing land dispute were posted. "If they delete it
[tacke.com], it will start again somewhere else," said Zero.
"In Vietnam, there are certain things you shouldn't mention, or should tone
down," said Hung.
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