Vietnam leads the Internet world in one index: volume of news coverage per incremental step toward actually creating Net access in the country. News services can be counted on to pick up Hanoi's announcement that it's studying Internet proposals, that it's considering approving Net proposals, that it's giving preliminary approval for Net proposals, that it's giving final approval for Net proposals. Then proposals must be converted into plans. And plans must go through the approval/study cycle.
And that brings us up to date, we think, because the Vietnamese government on Wednesday will announce it is awarding licenses to four Internet service providers. The news is so big, Hanoi has declared the day Vietnam Internet Day.
Meantime, a Vietnam government study of what we in the West refer to delicately as sanitation facilities shows that 6 million rural families have no toilets. As Reuters reports, the study found that most of the loo-less prefer "either to make use of relative's facilities or the local rice field."
Maybe more toilet proposals are needed.
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Don't tread on Net: Joanna Shelton, deputy secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, joined the long list of Western officials to declare that governments should tread lightly in regulating the Internet.
Talking up the organization's three-day conference, "Dismantling the Barriers to Global Electronic Commerce," which begins Wednesday in Paris, Shelton said nothing less than the robustness of global commerce is at stake.
Uttering words that could have come out of an Ira Magaziner briefing book, Shelton said of an OECD meeting scheduled for this weekend: "We are bringing together business and governments and a range of international organizations to find the barriers, eliminate them, and allow electronic commerce to flourish." 18.Nov.97
Reuters contributed to this report.
