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## author : sdenney@ocf.Berkeley.EDU
## date : 23.01.00
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January 18, 2000
Asian Technology
Internet Cafes Flourish in Vietnam,
Presenting a Puzzle About Policy
By STAN SESSER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
THE EMOTION CAFE is as slickly run as any
Internet cafe in the world. There's karaoke,
a giant-screen television set and a bar on
the ground floor. One floor up are a dozen
computers, with a knowledgeable staff
constantly at hand. If you look away from
your computer screen for merely a moment,
someone will run over to you, ready to bring
you a drink or help you with your surfing.
It's almost phantasmagoric -- that's a $1.25
word that an editor once inserted into one of
my articles, and it fits perfectly here --
that the Emotion Cafe is located in Hanoi.
The very same Hanoi that houses a government
bent on keeping total control over
everything, including the flow of
information. Bear in mind that it was only
two years ago that Vietnam reluctantly
allowed access to the Internet at all, other
than e-mail.
Yet at the Emotion Cafe, there's a constant
parade of Vietnamese customers surfing the
Net. They don't have to sign in or show any
sort of identification. All they need do is
sit down at a computer and start clicking
away, paying 600 dong a minute (four U.S.
cents) when they leave.
It would be easier to account for the
existence of the Emotion Cafe if it were
one-of-a-kind in Vietnam, getting some sort
of dispensation because of the political
connections of its owner. But this isn't the
case. Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City are overrun
with Internet cafes, some with rows of
computers, others mom-and-pop ventures that
consist of a single computer shoehorned into
a tiny storefront. In fact, judging from the
apparent decline in patronage in the year
between my visits, the Emotion Cafe is losing
business to new competitors that are charging
300 dong or 400 dong an hour.
THE BOOMING Internet cafe business in Vietnam
poses a real puzzle. I keep reading articles
about Vietnam threatening to ban satellite
dishes, about various government crackdowns
on the Internet, and about the police going
public with fears that "subversive"
correspondence is taking place via e-mail.
And I have no doubt that entire buildings in
Hanoi are filled with government censors
agonizing over every word that will appear in
the country's newspapers and magazines. Yet
despite all this, anyone can walk into an
Internet cafe and learn anything about what's
going on in Vietnam or the rest of the world.
To be sure, the government blocks the Web
sites of dissident Vietnamese groups, largely
in America and France; by one estimate, about
500 sites are blocked at the moment. But even
the elderly rulers of Vietnam must surely
realize that this represents little more than
an empty, symbolic gesture. Any one of
Vietnam's hordes of technically savvy young
people could tell them that there are
numerous ways of getting around a blocked
site. One of the easiest is by calling up
www.anonymizer.com or many similar sites,
which fight censorship by retrieving a
requested Web site and sending it to you. The
Internet service provider -- in Vietnam there
are already five, but all are
government-owned -- knows only that you're
corresponding with something called
anonymizer.com, and what you request
anonymizer to transmit to you remains
confidential.
I TRIED this in Ho Chi Minh City with
http://freeviet.org ("Freedom and Democracy
for Vietnam"). When I typed in the address, a
box came up asking me for an ID and an
authorization code. But when I requested it
through anonymizer.com, it was on my screen
in less than a minute.
Why are the Internet cafes allowed to
flourish? I think the paranoia of Vietnam's
rulers is so well known that we can eliminate
one explanation: that they've come to the
realization that the free flow of information
over the Internet is not about to imperil
their existence. Vietnam's Internet is still
so slow that when I check my e-mail, I have
an eternity of time to peek at what my
neighbors are doing. I can also click the
arrow to the right of the address box on the
browsers of the various computers I use, and
see what previous occupants of my seat have
been looking at. The answer is first, e-mail,
and second, computer games. The smattering of
other requests are generally related to
business or sports. One of my neighbors at
Emotion Cafe, for instance, was about to buy
a four-wheel-drive vehicle to take tourists
around the country, and he was researching
various possibilities. What they're not
looking at is dissident Web sites.
When I mentioned this to an American resident
of Hanoi, he wasn't surprised. "The average
person on the street doesn't know who the
dissidents are," he says. "And besides, how
many 23-year-olds do you see in Internet
cafes in the U.S. plowing through documents
in U.S. government archives?"
Then what is the explanation for the
government's relative tolerance? I think the
answer is that pure and simple greed is
outweighing ideological zealotry. In Vietnam,
as in China, the government
telecommunications monopolies are immensely
profitable, and we can safely assume that
some of these profits are finding their way
into the pockets of government officials. Yet
Vietnam has only 40,000 Internet users, with
a potential market of millions in just a few
years. If ever there were a case for keeping
alive the goose that is laying the golden
eggs, this is it.
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