Licences of news aggregators halted from Nov. 1

Hanoi (VNA) - The granting of licences for internet-based news aggregators by enterprises and organisations has been temporarily suspended from November 1, the Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) has announced.

The MIC said the move aims to tighten management of information and news sources on the internet.

It will also review and handle violating websites as well as news aggregators acting like online newspapers.  

Provincial and municipal departments of information and communications are tasked to review and make a list of licensed news aggregators. Those using domains or names containing words such as "newspaper," "magazine," "news," "times," etc. which might be mistaken for online newspapers will be asked to change.

These pages will have to show links leading to original articles coming from news services under their posts.

The MIC also demands them to have written agreements with press agencies to share articles and only be able to share them at least three hours after publishing time on the original site. These agreements have to be submitted to the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information or provincial departments of information and communications by November 15, 2019.

The departments should consider not licensing news readers with domains belonging to other localities or citing news about other localities.

The ministry will also tighten management over aggregators which operate as online newspapers, promote clickbait, violating copyright and other regulations on intellectual property./.