Sixty-five cyber cafe owners have been reprimanded, 27 of them fined, after authorities found they were breaking strict rules regarding use of the Internet in communist Vietnam, officials said Friday.
The investigation was conducted by the city department for culture and information and the department for science and technology and other relevant authorities of the city, said Chau Quoc Dung, chief investigator of the city's Culture and Information Department.
Most of the cafes were allowing customers to access pornographic Web sites, with 27 issued fines totalling US$5,270 dollars, Dung said.
The other 38 cafes are still being investigated, with more fines to follow, the official said.
The offending cafes were discovered during a 15-day-long inspection tour by city authorities last month, Dung said.
Around 2 million of Vietnam's 81 million people regularly access the Internet, but home computers are rare and most people use cybercafes to access the web.
The government operates firewalls on certain sites that are critical of the regime, and press freedom advocates Reporters Without Borders says there are seven cyber dissidents in prison or detained in Vietnam after using the Internet to express dissent.
Two of the dissidents on the list were arrested in Internet cafes as they were posting messages, the press freedom group said.
Last month, Vietnam announced that a new ministry of public security taskforce to tackle cyber crime would begin work.
Cyber crime is not yet a significant problem in one-party Vietnam, a police officer said. Internet users are still limited at the moment, he said, so crimes are not as common there as in other countries.
On the other side of Hanoi, Nguyen Tu Quang, the 29-year-old director of the Bach Hoa Internet Security centre, is more forthcoming.
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