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Asia and Internet (NY Times) -- exc



Subject: Re: Asia and Internet (NY Times) -- excerpts

Newsgroups: bit.listserv.seasia-l
Date: Wed, 7 Jun 1995 14:11:27 -0500
Sender: Southeast Asia Discussion List <SEASIA-L@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Asia & Internet from the NY Times
Comments: To: Third World list <thrdwrld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
          Thol Sok <THOL@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Lines: 175

Subj:Internet in Asia
2-Edged Sword: Asian Regimes On the Internet
New York Times 5/29/95 p. 1
           By PHILIP SHENON

  HANOI Vietnam--Tran Ba Thai sits among tangles of computer wire
in his dingy Hanoi office hoping that he can continue to connect
this long-isolated nation to the distant reaches of cyberspace.
  So far the aging Communists who run Vietnam have gone along
with Mr. Thai s plans for Net Nam the first commercial service
plugging Vietnam into the global web of computer networks known
as the Internet. But Mr. Thai a 44-year-old computer scientist
with Vietnam s Institute of Information Technology worries that
as Vietnam s electronic postmaster he may be walking a line as
thin as a strand of computer wire.
  While the Internet holds the promise of bolstering Vietnam's
economy by connecting this impoverished nation to the information
superhighway it also means that Vietnam might soon be deluged
with the sort of information that the Government has long sought
to keep out of the public s hands: the writings of Vietnamese
dissidents reports by human rights groups, pornography.
"I'm sure the Government is concerned about this," Mr. Thai said.
"But the Government knows that the advantages of this system are
bigger than the disadvantages. Vietnam has been totally isolated
and the Internet is the fastest cheapest way to reintegrate
Vietnam into the world."
    The cyberspace revolution may have been born in the computer
labs of the West but its impact will be felt most intensely in
the authoritarian nations of Asia the continent that is home to
two-thirds of the world's population and its fastest-growing
economies.
  And Asian governments are vowing to do what they can to control
the Internet. Last week, the iron-fisted Government of Singapore
announced that it would prosecute anyone who posted defamatory or
obscene material on the Internet. China is expected to restrict
access by keeping the cost of local Internet service artificially
high.  But it will be impossible to shut off the Internet
completely, short of cutting telephone lines and confiscating
computers--solutions that are not feasible in countries that are
trying to build modern, technologically advanced economies.
Information moves over the Internet so rapidly and uncontrollably
that in many countries, censorship could be a thing of the past.

  While most Asian governments have no affection for the concept
of freedom of speech, their disdain for the free flow of
information is tempered by the understanding that the future of
the world's economy will depend, on computers -- and the transfer
of information, including financial data and mail, over computer
networks. Their economic vitality may depend on having a
population that is computer literate and, more specifically,
Internet literate.  And so China, Vietnam, Indonesia Singapore
and Malaysia, which strictly censor every other form of
information available to the public, have been forced to open the
information floodgates with the Internet, even though that means
allowing  everything from political dissent to pornography to
go on line.

   For authoritarian governments, it's going to be a losing game
to try to control this, said Anthony M. Rutkowski, executive
director of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization in
Reston, Va. An estimated 200,000 computers in Asia are now
connected to the Internet, a number that is expected to grow
exponentially over the next several years. According to the
Internet Society, there are now more than 15,000 computers hooked
up to the Internet in Hong Kong, more than 8,000 in Singapore,
more than 3,000 in Thailand and more than 500 in China.

  Most computers are found at universities, government offices
and in the offices of large corporations, although increasingly--
especially in prosperous areas of Hong Kong and Singapore--
computers are found at home, used for everything from word
processing to computer games. But given the shortage of reliable
telephone lines outside major cities, the Internet is largely an
urban phenomenon in Asia.

  Among Asia's authoritarian nations, only North Korea and
Myanmar, formerly Burma, are sitting, out the communications
revolution for now, if only because they are too poor to afford
computers and the telephone equipment needed to reach the
network.

  Internet service made its debut in China only two years ago,
but there are already at least eight Internet servers there,
including a commercial service available to the general public
that was established in cooperation with Sprint, the American
telecommunications company. Ike servers allow a computer hookup
to the Internet through a local telephone number. In January,
Beijing announced that it would create a nationwide computer
network linking more than 100 college campuses to the Internet,
even though students at those same campuses were the center of
political dissent before the violent 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen
Square.
  The Communist Government of Vietnam is allowing Internet
servers to open for business, even though it has already had
difficulty controlling the deluge of electronic mail from
dissidents living abroad.  Some fervently anti-Communist
Vietnamese dissidents in Southern California have tried to flood
the personal electronic mail box of the Prime Minister of
Vietnam, Vo Van Kiet, an early advocate of the Internet. That has
alarmed the operators of Net Nam, which is urging its
subscribers, most of them businesses and private organizations,
to avoid transmitting antisocial information over the Internet.

  No country seems to be more aware of the opportunity and the
threat. posed by the Internet than Singapore, the wealthy
authoritarian city-state that has some of the strictest
censorship laws in Asia.  In Singapore, the Government is struck
by a contradictory impulse as it tries to establish Singapore as
the communications and financial hub of Southeast Asia. The
Government talks of making Singapore an intelligent island, and
so it not only allows the public access to the Internet, it
encourages it. The Singapore Government offers two services
connecting computer users to the Internet, and a third, private
service is being formed.  "The choice is either we master the
technology or it will master us," said George Yeo, the Minister
of Information and the Arts.
  But what that means is that a budding Singaporean dissident
need only sit down at a computer, dial a local telephone number
and type a simple instruction on the keyboard:
soc.culture.singapore
to find a plethora of mostly anonymous invective about the
Government, along with some spirited defenses of it.
  The free-wheeling criticism -- which might well have prompted a
knock on the door from the police if it had appeared in a
newspaper--is now freely available to tens of thousands of
computer users in Singapore -- and millions around the world--
through the Internet. Playboy may be banned in Singapore, but the
magazine's centerfold can be viewed, in full color, on the World
Wide Web, an area of the Internet devoted to individually
designed collections of text, graphics and sound, ("sites" or
"home pages") which are loosely linked together.

   China is reportedly planning to limit access by setting high
fees for Internet use. At a seminar in Hong Kong last week, a
researcher for China's Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications,
Jiang Lintao, said that China was looking for other ways of
controlling access-- "for putting a brake on certain information
when the networks become popular." He did not elaborate.

  Singapore is calling for self-policing of the system and has
warned that it will take legal action against anyone who uses the
Internet to transmit pornographic or seditions material. We
should never allow Singapore to be a source of pornographic or
incendiary broadcasts, Mr. Yeo said.   Last year, the Singapore
Government acknowledged it rifled through the files of users of
Technet, one of the two Government-financed Internet providers,
in search of pornography. The search turned up a few pornographic
images, leading the Government to post a computerized warning to
Technet users about countersocial activity.
  But the sweep also alarmed foreign corporations operating in
Singapore that use the Internet for electronic mail. The
companies feared that the Government might eventually begin
snooping into confidential corporate information. The Singapore
Government has since assured the companies that it has no
intention of conducting more unannounced searches.

  Stewart A. Baker, the former general counsel of the National
Security Council who is now a Washington lawyer and a specialist
in international telecommunications law, said he suspected that
Singapore and other governments would crack down on the Internet
through litigation against the large companies that provide
access to the system--say, a defamation suit against a large
multinational corporation with assets in Singapore, whose
employees place rude messages about Singapore on the Internet.

   I would think there would be difficulty enforcing this against
the little guys--the message senders-- but they will go after the
big companies that carry the messages, he said.
----------------------------------
[fair use reprint for scholarly comment only.]
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