This morning during the “fellows hour,” we hear from Tuan Nguyen who founded Vietnam Net (English version) in 1997, an ISP and content provider. He began in 1995 by putting together computers, installing linux, etc. In 1997, the government officially permitted people to connnect to the Internet. The site now has 1.5M viewers/day. (Vietnam’s population is 85M. About 5M people in Vietnam are on the Internet. About 6M have mobile phones.) The site has a newspaper license which enables its reporters to go anywhere and talk with anyone. The leaders of the party provide “guidelines” rather than ruling particular stories in or out. Mr. Nguyen also talks about some ways in which these talks and his site’s actions have affected government policy.

He says that the Internet is good for democracy in Vietnam, and has caused the mainstream media to become more open. The media in general have been a force for democracy, including in the fight against corruption. He points to the comments section of the site and to the ability of readers to post articles and comments — they receive about 1,000 submissions per day. They select and edit them, and post about 700/day. (His ISP services connects to a gateway that censors about .001% of web sites, mainly foreign ones critical of the government, based on the Ministry of Security’s directives.)

The site has a staff of 280. He is excited that his company advances people based on merit, including women. The company is profitable because of its mobile phone business; it loses money on its Internet operations. He invested in providing content to mobile phones. About 1M SMS messages go through his system every day. (It’s $0.20 for a ringtone.)

He concludes be expressing his excitement about how the Net is improving democracy in Vietnam, and what an exciting time this is.

(Take a look at Vietnam.net’s photo essay on “seeing off the Kitchen Gods.” More photo galleries here, including: Boat festival, Tet, first Valentine festival.)

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