The rapid development of the internet in Viet Nam has prompted a new management mechanism, Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Le Nam Thang has said.

"The Party and the Government consider the internet important infrastructure and it thus is important to have as an effective management model," he told a conference held on Tuesday in HCM City reviewing implementation of Decree 97/2008/ND-CP and soliciting contributions for the new decree draft.

Thang said after three years of this decree, the number of internet service providers stood around 100, a five-fold increase while the bandwidth had been expanded eight times. There are currently 36,300 internet shops nation-wide.

Le Thi Ngoc Mo, deputy head of the ministry's Communications Department, said the new regulations would intensify the control over the operation of internet shops, particularly those providing online games services to the public.She said a three-hour time limit was proposed for people playing online game from a single game provider. Additionally, the online game services would have to shut down from 11p.m to 8a.m.

The ministry required online game providers to guarantee those limitations be met with technical control.

Pham Quoc Ban, director of the Ha Noi Department of Information and Communications, said that based on his own experience of cracking down on 500 internet workshops near schools, technical methods would not succeed because users would find ways to get around them. He said it should begin with an overhaul in the administrative management of internet shops. For example, an internet shop should meet stricter requirements in order to secure a business licence. One additional condition, he suggested, should be the documentation of the neighbourhood consent to the location of internet shops. The minimum space for a shop ranged from 50 to 80 square metres and the operation of the shop would come under close supervision of the local authorities.

Le Hong Minh, general director of the VNG, a major local player of online games, complained about unfair treatment of domestic enterprises, citing that 30 per cent of online game players subscribed to foreign providers who could reap millions of dollars in revenue from Vietnamese markets while not having to pay taxes or abide by local regulations.

"Apart from comparatively lower technical capacities, it is these policies that hinder the competitive edges of local players, rendering our loss of the market on our own ground," he said.

He said the decree draft still missed out on the management of offline games. To date, as many as 93 online games that have been approved, among them 34 games turned out to be commercial failures and thus exited the market.

VNS