Vietnam Wants Internet Cafes To Monitor Internet Usage

from the don't-download-bad-information dept

If there's one thing that's obviously available in bunches on the internet, it's "bad information." However the Vietnamese government has decided that "bad information" (which they seem to believe is anything they don't agree with, or anything that portrays them in a negative light - this post, for example, would probably qualify) is illegal and must be stopped online. They've now told local governments to start monitoring internet usage and have warned internet cafe owners they can be fined or jailed if any of their patrons uploads or downloads "bad information." To help track this sort of thing, they also want all internet cafe owners to "document what Web sites their clients visit and for how long." In other words, it's now prohibitively expensive to run an internet cafe in Vietnam. It's amazing that these sorts of regimes honestly believe that stopping such info, at the cost of killing off all of the benefits the internet provides, is actually worthwhile.

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