State eyes set to police the web

In a legally binding instruction issued last week, the ministry said all of the country’s 4,000 Internet cafe owners must provide a list of all the websites visited by their customers in the previous 30 days. They must also supply the credit card details or ID card numbers of the customers that accessed any of the “inappropriate” sites. Internet cafe owners must keep records of this kind from now on and be prepared to present them to ministry inspectors when they call.
Internet cafes are not allowed to offer “unhealthy games and discs” and have to prevent access to “unwholesome” websites — those that are sexually explicit, “superstitious” or violent, according to the instruction. Cafe owners can be charged if their customers download information deemed “bad” in political terms. The Ministry of Public Security will monitor access to these kinds of websites. The new instruction is part of a ministry campaign to get provincial and city authorities to exercise more control over the content of websites.
Vu Xuan Thanh, deputy head of the information ministry’s investigation department, said authorities, including provincial leaders, and culture and information officials at the ward level, had to take more responsibility for preventing young people accessing inappropriate websites.
“[Local authorities] are the most important sector to the success of this campaign. But, they don’t care much about the problem at the moment,” Thanh said.
“It goes against the good morals of Vietnamese if we allow our young people to view sexual websites.”
Thanh said it was hard to manage Internet services because there were no clear licensing or operating regulations. However, monitoring Internet cafes is problematic because of a lack of equipment, and establishing who is violating the new regulations is also difficult because the ministry lacks staff with the necessary IT expertise. Thanh said there was no software capable of barring “inappropriate” websites.
But Thanh said that in countries like China, the government monitors content and access by linking cafes to a central agency where they can “manage each subscriber”.
The new decree says the biggest fine for Internet cafe owners hosting inappropriate websites has been increased by VND10 million to VND30 million ($1,900).
The old fine was issued in January in Decision 71 from the Ministry of Public Security.
According to the latest survey conducted by the ministry in 2002, up to 70 per cent of customers of Internet cafes went there to chat online.
Another 10 per cent went to play games, and 10 per cent to send emails. Ten per cent used the cafes to search for information — half this group searched for websites with sexual content.