By Thilo Maluch - Although the use of the Internet is on the rise in Yemen, the country still needs to find a way to use its full potential in terms of business, information, education and communication. The Web could even be used to promote a better understanding of Democracy and freedom of speech, but here it is used mainly for pleasure or not at all.

For many people today, the Internet is the main way to find all kinds of information, do business, communicate or even meet new people. In the European Union, the Internet is also seen as a major business factor, and there are even efforts to boost the use of high-speed Internet and affordable flat-rates for citizens. Flat-rates in Europe, that offer unlimited Internet access at a fixed monthly rate, can be as cheap as five Euros (about YR 1250) per month in expensive countries such as Germany.

In Yemen, the Internet is still only used by the few who can afford it.
“Sixty percent of Internet subscriptions are owned by the business community, and 23 percent are personal subscriptions,” said Helmi Noman, a technology analyst who specializes in Internet use in developing countries.
“Foreign organizations and expatriates share a relatively large portion (14 percent) of the total number of subscriptions. The lowest penetration rate is among educational institutions (2 percent) and government offices (1 percent).”

His research shows that email communication is the number one reason in Yemen for using the Internet, followed by browsing information and chatting. Sadly, there is a very low percentage of online academic research (5 percent) because many Yemenis don’t speak English, the main language of academic content on the World Wide Web. Furthermore most of the Yemeni educational institutions have not integrated the Internet into their education system.

Asked what his customers look for at the Internet, Ali an employee at a big Sana’a Internet café, said: “Some chat or listen to music, but a lot of the young men look for sex sites. That is a big problem.” Although he is worried about the reputation of his workplace, he said that there is little he can do about it, since he can’t monitor all the computers. Ali feels that it is the government’s responsibility to block websites that contain nudity. “But a true Muslim, who has respect for the holy Qur’an, would never look at ‘bad’ pictures on the Web,” Ali added. “So I have to trust the customers.”
This trust might be a bit naïve, since information from Google indicates that out of the top ten countries whose users are searching for the term “sex,” eight are Muslim (joined only by Vietnam and India).

According to a UNDP study, Ali’s observations about his customers are true. Almost half of the visited entertainment sites in Yemen are pornography sites. “Even though the two Internet Service Providers in Yemen use server-based filtering systems to block access to sex and pornography sites, the randomly selected server-generated log files indicated that 46 percent of the entertainment sites are pornography sites,” the study reports.
Despite efforts by both of Yemen’s service providers Teleyemen and YemenNet, Internet filtering seems not to work properly. The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) tested the filtering systems of TeleYemen and YemenNet to limit the Internet content citizens can access.

ONI’s report on Internet filtering in Yemen concludes “that the state does not try to control broadly what its citizens see on the Internet. For instance, unlike certain other states that filter Internet content, Yemen does not block political content and its blocking of religious content is limited, focusing only on a small number of anti-Islam sites.”

It’s not just the high costs of Internet access that is a challenge to Yemeni internet literacy, but it seems that the internet is, by some, perceived as a threat to morals or culture of the Yemenis.

In effect the possible advantages of Internet use in Arabia Felix are rather limited in comparison to other countries. Issues such as poverty, high illiteracy, poor telecommunication systems, and a lack of institutional support affect the characteristics of Internet users and their online behavior. A tremendously large portion of the population, especially those in rural areas, is offline. The number of Internet surfers in Yemen came to only 110,000 in 2006, though this is up from 3,800 in 1991, according to a report of the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper.

The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information reports that Yemen ordered Internet cafés to remove the barriers between computer stations in the cafés, thus eliminating users’ privacy and causing a decline in the cafés’ usage and profitability. The report also claims that the state imposes broad censorship on political and cultural Web sites under the guise of preserving “morality.” HRinfo thinks that the Yemeni government has spared no effort to hinder the democratic experiment in Yemen. Some human rights organizations observed the imposing of restrictions on the freedom of the press and the blocking of many political websites in the course of the recent elections.

Source: Yemen Observer