The Right to Surf in Vietnam

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam —  In a country with only 100,000 or so computers and a state-controlled media, Vo Dinh Thi’s idea was almost revolutionary. Even his mother said he was foolish to throw his money away on such a hare-brained scheme.

But Thi went ahead and remodeled his little cafe on Le Duan Street, two blocks from the abandoned U.S. Embassy. He taught his staff to make the best cappuccino in town and he put in three computers, offering customers something that is still rare in Vietnam: e-mail.

“Business has been all word of mouth so far, and it’s been good; next month I’ll start advertising,” said Thi, 43, who charges about 30 cents to receive or send e-mail and who has become a sort of postmaster for the multitudes without e-mail addresses.

E-mail cafes (Thi’s address is [email protected]) may sound old hat to most of the world, but not to Vietnam, where connecting directly to the Internet remains illegal. No more than a few thousand people in this country of 75 million even have access to e-mail, which is available through five local providers.

It’s a crude system. One of the largest services--Netnam, run by the ministry of technology--sends e-mail messages in batches four times a day to Australia National University, where they are transferred to the Internet. Netnam and VNMail, operated by the telecommunications monopoly and Netnam, have been criticized for lack of reliability, with some users claiming that only 70% of their e-mail gets through.

All that may soon be changing. Ever since the government promised in 1995 that by the end of the century information technology would become “one of the spearheads of the country,” Vietnam’s Communist leadership has debated how to put citizens online without sacrificing the state’s ability to control the flow of information in and out of the country.

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The country has moved in fits and starts toward the Internet since then, but every day lost leaves Vietnam a little farther behind its more economically advanced Asian neighbors. While everyone else, from China to Singapore, is signing on and Malaysians are using prepaid cards at dozens of kiosks for Internet access, Vietnam is still restricting the private use even of TV satellites, requiring prospective buyers to file individual applications that the government considers on a case-by-case basis.

“Until Vietnam gets on the Internet, its ability to compete in the regional marketplace will be severely restricted,” said one European businessman. “For instance, Vietnam would like to develop a high-quality software industry. Without the Internet, it won’t happen.”

The government, pragmatic to the core and moving cautiously toward a free-market economy, is well aware of the perils of lagging behind and is in the final stages of preparing legislation that could, in a matter of weeks, carry Vietnam into the age of information.

According to local press reports, Vietnam will have one state-run gateway to the Internet and will filter everything on it through a sort of “bamboo curtain.” As in Singapore, users will be held accountable for what they send--and receive. In recent test runs, the government’s network has been successfully linked with the World Wide Web.

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To reach the Internet today, Vietnam residents must make a long-distance call--say, to Hong Kong at $3.80 a minute--and sign on to a provider. Though that is prohibitively expensive for most Vietnamese, the country’s high literacy rate (91%) and increasingly educated and professional population indicate that the Internet has great potential here.

The government’s wariness about the Internet isn’t surprising, because anyone with a computer and $20 for subscription fees to a service provider can become a dissident activist these days.

The Internet has become an important tool for human rights organizations in Asia and elsewhere. Human rights monitors can check accounts of abuses in the field and write a report, and in two or three weeks it is on the Internet for all the world to see.

In Myanmar, the main opposition group got its start in Thailand a few years ago with a single computer powered by a 286 chip. It used the computer to write a grant application for more computers and now has become a potent anti-government force. At times it has crippled the government’s e-mail system with a flood of junk messages.

Vietnam faces considerable opposition abroad from Vietnamese who fled the country between 1975 and 1989. Many still harbor ill will toward the government in Hanoi, and several of the groups, including the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, use Web pages to spread anti-government articles.