[Vnbiz] Filtering in Vietnam emphasizes politics

[Phan, Tai]

Filtering in Vietnam emphasizes politics By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer 
Wed Aug 9, 6:36 PM ET
 


NEW YORK - Looking at Internet filtering practices in Vietnam, one could conclude that the government is more worried about politics than porn. University researchers said in a report Wednesday that the practices run counter to the government's own statements. 

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"Vietnam purports to prevent access to Internet sites primarily to safeguard against obscene or sexually explicit content," the report said. "However, the state's actual motives are far more pragmatic."

Vietnam's Internet service providers did not block any of the pornography sites tested but filtered most of the sites "with politically or religiously sensitive material that could undermine Vietnam's one-party system."

China and other regimes worried about political sites also turn their attention to blocking porn, said Derek Bambauer, a research fellow with OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration of Harvard University, the University of Toronto and the University of Cambridge.

Bambauer also said Vietnam's filtering got more sophisticated in just the six months studied.

The report found filtering the responsibility of government-owned or -licensed service providers, with the two main ones in Vietnam taking different approaches.

One uses traditional filtering, and attempts to access a banned site produce a message saying the site had been blocked.

The other took records of the banned sites out of its domain-name servers completely, producing "site not found" errors as if the sites had never existed, Bambauer said.

"It's something we've seen in isolated incidents in other states," he said. "It's the first widescale usage of this technique."