Myanmar Works Hard to Keep the Internet Out
In downtown Yangon, Internet entrepreneur Aye Min Oo is busy selling space on a Web site that he cannot access. To woo advertisers who are also forbidden to access the World Wide Web in military-ruled Myanmar, formerly Burma, he transports his tourist-oriented Web site's pages the old-fashioned way.
“I travel around Yangon and demonstrate the pages on the hard drive of my laptop,” he said. “We e-mail new pages to the webmaster in Belgrade. Hopefully, some day we will see it online here ourselves.”
Aye Min Oo's roundabout access to the Internet may not be ideal, but it is a rare privilege in isolated Myanmar, a Southeast Asian country of 48 million people where some of the world's toughest Internet restrictions are vigorously enforced.
