Vietnam's strict new controls on Internet access and satellite dishes are seen as part of a struggle for control of the nation's potentially lucrative telecommunications industry.
Under the new rules, domestic ISPs and users could face fines, suspensions, and criminal prosecution for accessing information the government deems illegal. Using an ISP based outside Vietnam is now a crime.
"It will prevent Vietnamese citizens from gaining inexpensive access to the Net through a server outside the country and thus prevent them from exchanging ideas on how to integrate Vietnam's economy into the global market," Human Rights Watch said in a protest letter sent to Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet and the secretary-general of the Vietnamese Communist Party, Do Muoi.
The decree comes amid a host of other government-sponsored information crackdowns in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Hanoi recently announced that it will confiscate satellite dishes beginning in April - enlisting police to collect illegal dishes and impose fines of up to US$50. Only government officials and party leaders, some foreigners, and designated hotels will be allowed to keep their satellite dishes. An official from the National Information and Culture Service told Vietnam Insight that denying citizens access to the dishes, and thus to international broadcasts, was necessary because "there are unequal levels of education among people, and information is from many directions."
Clearly Vietnam isn't waving the information-wants-to-be-free banner. The official party newspaper, Nhan Dan, is required reading for the elite, and the government keeps close tabs on foreign literature coming into the country. Last month, officials started jamming Vietnamese-language broadcasts of Radio Free Asia just days after the broadcasts began. And the regime recently launched a Web site called Que Huong, or Homeland, offering government policy to keep the nearly 2 million Vietnamese who live overseas abreast of the official goings-on in their native land.
But the recent crackdown is more complicated than just the government's obstruction of what many Westerners think of as the right to free speech. It highlights a recent attempt by the Vietnam National Posts and Telegraph - the state-owned telecom monopoly - to maintain centralized power by restricting Net content and access to satellite dishes. It also reveals a power struggle between various government factions to gain control over the potentially lucrative telecommunications industry.
"The 'censorship' issue was used by the posts and telegraphs agency to get the Ministry of the Interior on their side, against those who wanted a more pluralistic approach, or who wanted their own monopoly," said Rob Hurle, an expert on Vietnam's telecommunications at the Australian National University in Canberra.
For now, the only Net connection that exists in Vietnam is email - and email subscribers have to pay for all correspondences sent to them, jacking up costs. The Vietnam Academic Research and Educational Network and NetNam are the two ISPs servicing the country's universities, and have some 7,000 subscribers. Several intranet services are being developed, Hurle said.
But the larger problem in Vietnam - in which all state enterprises are operating at a loss as much as two and a half times their equity capital, according to official government reports - is a lack of telecommunications infrastructure in an era when Southeast Asia is entering into the global economy.
"It's a slow process," said Hurle, "especially for a poor country still devastated by decades of economic and other types of warfare."
