Internet diplomacy

Yesterday in Hanoi Hillary Clinton, America's secretary of state, chided her hosts on failing to keep the internet open and free. Vietnam has blocked Facebook since November of 2009. (In that year, the site had grown from 40,000 users in Vietnam to 1m.) Around the same time, someone infected computers with a programme disguised as a Vietnamese-language keyboard driver, then used those computers in denial-of-service attacks on websites that opposed bauxite mining in Vietnam, a government priority. Vietnam jails bloggers. And, according to Duy Hoang of the Vietnam Reform Party, hackers in Vietnam pulled down and then published the database of a website that served as a gathering point for the Vietnamese diaspora.

(You can read more from The Economist on bloggers in Vietnam here.)

So Mrs Clinton is doing the right thing. But she may not be doing it the right way. Reading about her appearance yesterday, I thought of a panel I watched in April that featured Mr Hoang and Adrian Hong of the Pegasus project, a foundation that focuses on communication in closed societies. Mr Hong pointed out that, for America, human rights has generally been only a rhetorical priority. He had a hard time thinking of any real international state action aimed solely at human rights; when diplomats close the doors behind them, he said, they talk about trade. He saw no reason to think the right to unhindered access to the internet would be any different.

But neither Mr Hong or Mr Hoang, the Vietnamese reformer, wanted to discount America's role entirely. Mr Hoang said that international support is of tremendous value inside of Vietnam, and that America happens to be the country with the most leverage. I asked him for one single effective thing that Hillary Clinton could do for him on her next trip to Vietnam. He said that access to the internet doesn't have to be a question of human rights; it can be one of trade and development, too. Ms Clinton might, he said, behind closed doors point out to her counterparts how important the internet is for jobs and education, and that a closed internet creates fewer innovations than an open one.

Babbage hopes, then, that she did that as well.