And it's almost....Liberation Day ?
October 10th is celebrated as Liberation Day in Vietnam's capital Hanoi, and is marked by three main types of events.
First, a succession of long and self-congratulatory speeches by government officials. Second, an outbreak of socialist realist art, featuring peasants with suspiciously good teeth gazing upwards to a glorious future of ripe corn bundles and cement factories. Third, mass gymnastic displays by schoolchildren, the classic hallmark of all totalitarian states. These are all things that Vietnam does very well.
On the same day this year, almost exactly five years since Vietnam connected to the World Wide Web, webmasters, content providers and ISPs around the country were digesting new regulations for Internet content which had just been issued by the Ministry of Culture and Information. These are things that Vietnam does very badly.
"Like many Vietnamese legal documents, this one seems to have been written in Delphi, i.e. like an oracle, with plenty of room to interpret and speculate, and in the end to blame everybody for everything," wrote one foreigner helping to run a foreign organization's Web site in Vietnam.
The document in question is known as Decision 27, which asks all people who provide information for publication on the Web to obtain official licenses to do so.
And, to simplify the design of a Web site's home page, Decision 27, Article 5, offers the following instructions.
"All the contents must be placed on the home pages and front pages of the information providers on the Internet, and of Web sites on the Internet, including the following:
1. Names of the providers of information and of Web sites;
2. Names of host agencies (if any);
3. Numbers and dates of issuance of licenses, and names of agencies that granted licenses.
4. Full names of the main responsible persons of providers of information and Web sites on the Internet."
There goes that snappy front page with the Flash animation, then. But it's not all bad -- there's money to be made from this, as Article 11 points out:
"Article 11: Agencies, organizations and individuals that render meritorious services to the authorities in detecting and reporting violations of rules and regulations on provision of information provided for by Decree No. 55/2001/ND-CP, and of provisions of this Statute, shall be commended according to regulations by the State."
Of course, it is nobody else's business if the government of Vietnam decides to increase its control over Web content. But it's an odd way to treat a medium which, even the government has accepted, is a key element in the country's drive to climb out of poverty.
"The youth of the (Ho Chi Minh) city train for the knowledge revolution in order to address the task of industrializing and modernizing the country," says a poster celebrating the 46th anniversary of a youth organization, featuring two worthy young citizens. She's carrying a bunch of flowers, and he's wearing overalls and gloves, suggesting they have been taking part in a gardening competition.
State monopoly telecommunications provider Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Corp. (VNPT) is less poetic about the country's Internet plans: "Speeding up the popularization of the Internet in economic, cultural and social activities, developing the Internet for accommodating various services such as e-commerce, e-newspapers, e-government, posts, telecommunications, finance, banking, education and training, and healthcare via the Internet serving the national cause of industrialization and modernization."
Sounds good. Still, the number of Internet subscribers in Vietnam is around 200,000 out of a population of 80 million, a penetration rate of 0.25 percent, and around 80 percent of subscribers use the Internet for chat, and a few for e-mail, according to Internet experts in the country.
Creating an extra truckload of red tape through which potential Web pioneers will have to machete their way, isn't going to set the country on the way to that Web-borne information future, foreigners working in Vietnam agree.
"The 10th of October might be the Liberation Day of Hanoi, but it is the re-incarceration day for the Internet in Vietnam," wrote one foreigner. "They have a dead-sure way to make the Internet in Vietnam a fairly useless toy: make it difficult for Web sites, but easy (i.e. cheap) to access."
In a country that needs all the modernization it can get, that paints a gloomy picture.
By David Legard -IDG News Service - November 4, 2002
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