After 7 years of implementation, Decree 72/2013/ND-CP (“Decree 72”) on the management of supply, use of Internet services and online information has revealed legal gaps: has not yet stipulated the responsibilities of telecommunications enterprises and service providers data center; cross-border game management issues. In order to better manage the environment of the Internet and information within, the Vietnamese Government decided to amend and supplement Decree 72.
This article will focus on relevant amendments and supplements related to 02 following issues: the responsibilities of cross-border service providers and central data services.
The responsibilities of cross-border service providers
– The draft proposed to expand the scope of the requirement to cooperate with the Ministry of Information and Communications (“MIC”) remove or block illegal content for accounts with more than 100.000 monthly visitors.
– The draft imposes a number of additional obligations on cross-border service providers as follows:
- Prevent access to illegal services by the request of the MIC;
- Cooperation with Vietnamese press when providing quoted references from local press according to copyright regulations;
- Establish a department to receive, process and respond to requests from competent agencies under Vietnamese law, and at the same time deal with and respond to complaints of Vietnamese users;
- Only allow Vietnamese accounts, community pages, and content creators’ channels that had already announced theirs contact information to the MIC to live-stream and to participate in the revenue-generating services of any kind, in the case of providing cross-border information through social networks;
- Publicize policies and procedures to assist customers in handling issues on network safety and security.
– The draft requires cross-border service providers to set up a mechanism to remove/restrict contents at the request of the MIC and temporarily block/delete contents at the request of Vietnamese users regarding 02 following types of content violation:
- Information affecting normal physical and mental development of children;
- Information that infringes upon the intellectual property rights of other individuals or organizations.
Central data services
– The draft supplements regulation requesting central data service providers to register business license for the MIC. Especially, cross-border service providers of this kind have to issue a notice to the MIC.
The draft was issued on July 5th, 2021 and is being consulted until the end of September 5th, 2021.
