Vietnam’s New Internet Decree

Not easy to shut it down

David Brown
Asia Sentinel | 12.8.20113 |

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

From the flurry of alarms filling space in Western media last week, a reader could be forgiven for thinking that the Vietnamese government has finally figured out how to suppress the dissident bloggers that torment it.

The furor has been prompted by Decree-Law 72 on Management of the Internet, which the Hanoi regime published on July 30. A spokesman for the Committee to Protect Journalists called the edict “Vietnam’s latest attempt to…deter all forms of critical commentary online.”? “Nothing less than the harshest offensive against freedom of information since…2011” declared Reporters sans Frontiers (RSF). The US Embassy expressed “deep concern.” “A new low,” said the Washington Post.

Attention has focused on a few lines in Article 20 of the decree, which forbid bloggers or people who post to FaceBook and other social media to “provide aggregated news.”

Trouble is, that’s probably not what the Vietnamese authorities intend, and even if they do, stopping their Internet-savvy citizens from reposting or linking to news stories is almost certainly beyond their ability.

Foreigners tend to take reports of human rights violations in Vietnam at face value and assess them out of context. That’s not surprising. Hanoi’s dogged effort to punish bloggers for “conducting propaganda against the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” (Article 88 of the Criminal Code), “carrying out activities aimed at overthrowing the people’s administration” (Article 79) or “abusing democratic freedoms” (Article 258) has conditioned foreign human rights advocates to assume the worst of motives and methods. Continue reading…