Cyber palaces replace Internet cafes

If you had asked someone six years ago what Taiwan's Internet cafe of today would look like, that person might have described something like Ha2 (哈哈活力站) in Shilin (士林), near Taipei's Jiantan MRT station (劍潭站). Located beneath a winding staircase on a street that's often crowded with high school students, H2 is as sleek as a nightclub and as comfortable as the lobby of a five-star hotel. Effortlessly filling its 920m2 spread are 180 high-powered computers, soft white sofas and a conference room straight out of a James Bond movie.

Where competitors smell like airport smoking lounges and serve ramen noodles and instant coffee, H2 has a state-of-the-art ventilation system, a walk-in cooler, and a menu that lists pizza and fried chicken. Customers here for relaxation can read comic books at four-person pods with flat-panel monitors that swivel on mechanical arms, or pair off in cubicles with adjustable, wood-finish desks. Those on business get projector screens and a conference table with a partition that raises via remote control to reveal personal workstations. Set well apart from these areas are rows and rows of brand-new dual-processor PCs, where scores of young men battle day and night with keyboard and mouse on the latest online games.

Among the hundreds of Internet cafes that existed in Taipei six years ago, Ha2 stands out — not so much for staying on the cutting edge of technology and comfort as for the fact that it's still around. Initial overinvestment in the industry, followed by government policies designed to address social problems linked to Internet cafes, have taken their toll. In 2002 there were 32 Internet cafes in Shilin alone, now there are nine, Ha2 manager Rich Kao (高盛興) said.

It's harder now than it was to find an Internet cafe in Taipei, but there are still more than 200 licensed ones in the city to choose from. Others have gone underground, unable to comply with city regulations mandating that they not operate within 200m of a school and limiting the hours when minors can visit. Many Internet cafes, unable to attract new investors, look like time capsules from the turn of the century, albeit with newer games and smoke-yellowed walls.

"Half of the social problems in Taiwan, the government — and the media — have blamed on Internet cafes," said Jacky Wu (吳振彰), founder of industry giant Aztec Technology (戰略高手), which once had nearly 90 franchises across Taiwan but now operates around three-dozen.

The trouble started with concerns that teenagers were spending too much time in Internet cafes, where they were exposed to excessive violence in computer games and could easily obtain access to pornographic Web sites or meet ill-intentioned strangers in online chat rooms. A survey supervised by a former justice minister found that around 400,000 young students were visiting Internet cafes at least once a week, spending an average of eight-and-a half-hours there. It was speculated that more than a quarter of young patrons were addicted to online games.

The Taipei City government responded in 2001 by passing a statute regulating "information-recreation service providers" (資訊休閒業), or Internet cafes. According to published accounts, 90 percent of the city's estimated 800 Internet cafes did not comply with some aspect of the statute, which in addition to restricting access by the young also mandated that such businesses only operate in commercial areas on streets 8m wide or larger, where rent was more expensive than the residential areas where most had set up shop. The national government responded with its own, less stringent regulations.