As Phụ Nữ reports, Vietnam recently announced Decree No. 342, which details a number of provisions to the national Advertising Law, due to take effect from February 15, 2026. The adjustments are expected to place stricter control on Vietnam’s online advertising activities to protect consumers and curb illegal ads.
Amongst the decree articles, some standout stipulations include a hard cap on the waiting time before viewers can skip video and animated ads to no more than 5 seconds. Static ads must be immediately cancellable.
YouTube: okay, after 5 seconds you can skip to the next ad.
they will simply use this as justification to block YouTube from the country.
it’s an extremely popular site in Vietnam, but they’ve been trying to block it as well as Facebook for years. they’ve also blocked steam, the BBC, paste bin, medium… The Vietnamese government does not care about Internet technology I promise.
Social media is supposedly a threat to that government, but at the same time, however, they allow some fly-by-night outfits to run fake CSR operations covering up spam jobs and scams on social media.
The anti-government sentiment is very strong in the country right now because of all these new decrees that they’re making, some of which are batshit crazy, and the speech is happening largely on YouTube
Vietnam’s 2nd win against US
this is woke liberal communism, won’t somebody think of the shareholders?
(/j)
We obviously didn’t bomb them enough, they sure are uppity
LAUNCH THE SEVENTH FLEET, GET THE COMMIES
This is good and would be better than trying to fight adblockers all the time.
5 seconds? Just skip that as well.
Good, a lot of people DOESN’T wanna sit through a long ad
Especially when the ad is longer than the video you are trying to watch.
Or you watch the entire video than accidentally swipe the edge of your phone and you are sent back, then have to watch it again to view the video once you click it again.
Very glad Vietnam banned unskippable ads - for an already-existing-socialist country that supports a philosophy that encourages common ownership of the means of production (and wouldn’t allow advertising), but allows advertising, this is a pretty good decision.
Also, how is Vietnam allowing ads if they’re a Marxist-Leninist country?
I guess the alternative is locking their people out of Youtube by effectively banning it. Even this is a gutsy move TBH.
It’s the same deal when “how is it that you’re paying taxes if you’re a libertarian”?
That’s not what I mean - A lot of libertarians support the notion that taxation is theft, but they DOESN’T make them tax evaders. Every year on April 15th they had to file their taxes to the IRS (because obviously it’s better than NOT filing them).
What I was trying to ask is if Vietnam supports communism (which calls for the abolition of money, among other things), how do they allow advertising? China did the same thing.
They DON’T
Unless you are doing that on purpose, then well played lol
it’s like eye bleach when reading
Yeah, you’re right, I looked it up.
Apparently that’s the “Chinese characteristics” in “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” is more like Market Marxism
Nice but all I want is actually liability. Meta should be hold liable for each and every single scam ad and here in south-east asia it’s just rampant.
I see nothing but blatant scams, especially on Meta platforms. I don’t mean simple e-commerce scams either where you buy some trash and it never gets sent to you - it’s full on phishing and finance scams.
I just dont understand how are we collectively ok with this - every platform should have the burden of full liability, period. If someone gets their money taken through scam ad not only Meta should pay them back but suffer a 100x fine as well. The unskippable ad is nothing compared to this.
Please stop using those Meta platforms and stick sites like Bluesky or Lemmy.
100% and I’m an early adopter of all decentralized platforms but I still run IT of my all extended family and have a few connections through these platforms so even with my limited use I’m still exposed to so many scams. I can’t imagine what a daily normal user sees, it must be just scam after scam.
I’d love that, but I need Whatsapp to participate in society. Several companies, mostly SMEs in fact but also big ones won’t talk to me if not through Whatsapp.
Same with google in East Europe. Constantly seeing AI generated politicians pushing for scams. Several times I’ve reported the more obvious scams with proof. Google has always responded to me that it does not break their terms of service. So if you want to advertise scams - know that google allows it.
At least 10% of their entire ad revenue comes from ads related to Scams or illegal things.
I mean you seem to keep using those meta platforms. Sounds like you are okay with the scam ads then.
They didn’t say stop participating in society they said stop using Metas plaforms which is actually a really easy thing to do.
Unless you think Facebook/IG are society.
No, but some public transit services, random service providers, random SMEs whose services I use communicate solely through Whatsapp.
Good job, a small step the right direction.
Vietnam is about to see a lot of people connecting to their servers through VPNs.
I wouldn’t be surprised if google/YouTube just bans all VPN IPs. They already make you sign in lately if your IP range has been “shadow banned.”
They can’t ban all VPN IPs though
Me: imdb movie name… thinking it will save me a second.
“Click the stop signs”
Me: fuck it, I really didn’t need to know if that actor was also the one who played in other movie.
We were trained into saving time with search engines, now I have to remember to not use them and just type in imdb.com and then use their search function
There are several domains specific search features like duckduckgo bangs that allow you to directly search popular websites with text like
interstellar !imdb- it’s super useful! I think firefox has something like this built in too.
Imgur bans my IP from a Digital Ocean droplet of my own build. Just sayin’, they’re not only operating from known IP ranges.
A digital ocean IP is going to be under a specific ASN with information on multiple ip ranges. These ASN under a corporation are public and easy to block.
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It very much is possible to ban “all” public and even commercial VPNs. VPN traffic tends to have very distinct characteristics in logs and it is not overly difficult for orgs to get the IP ranges allocated to each company.
What is not possible is banning all vpn traffic in the sense that a friend or family member sets up wireguard for you. But that is a drop in the bucket to the point of being functionally nonexistent.
The middle ground, of course, are pseudo-botnets of compromised computers. But those also tend to be a fairly small percentage (outside of DDOSing) and are likely getting blocked for other reasons.
There are even companies selling lists of IPs for all sort of behaviour and characteristics. Just adding one of those is trivial.
Though google has a lot more data and engineers so they could just create a better one themselves.
It is a constant cat and mouse game between VPN providers and other actors. A few IPs get on a list, they try to find others, repeat
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If your corporate VPN is routing ALL traffic then your IT department are idiots. And I am pretty sure said company would thank google for blocking youtube from their employees.
Depends.
I am in uni, so a bit different, but there’s many sites that allow access to articles, studies, books, etc. to us based on source IP. And I guess it could be hard to route only those, especially if some of them decide to use Cloudflare or similar.Another option is doing so for easier monitoring of work devices that people will always try to use for things they’re not supposed to.
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And, when discussing stuff like this, it is important to understand that “all VPNs” actually means corporate and public VPNs.
If you want to have an actual conversation then context matters. Rather than just fixating on nonsensical overly literal interpretations because you only want to be “technically correct” by attacking a strawman.
It’s always funny when a service “bans” the use of a VPN but you can almost always find a server that works.
It happens if there’s a lot of traffic from the same IP, happened to me when I first imported my subscriptions into smart tube on my tv after I cancelled YouTube premium when they jacked up the price. Was just a temporary ban though.
you’d be better off connecting to the netherlands or some other country that straight up don’t get ads though
Uhhh we have ads…
i think i confused it with twitch from a couple of years ago, quick google search says people are using albanian VPNs to avoid ads on youtube
not that it matters much since using ublock is easier anywaysorry for spreading misinformation on the internet, i take my L+bozo card ._.
Fair enough! You have my respect
Mobile game ads that make you close it three times before they let you continue playing can fuck off as well. Trying to trick me into clicking on your ad only makes me hate your product more, idiots.
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls#mobile-os
blocks all ads device-wide for free. the “base” profile should be good enough for most people. note: while this is provided by Mullvad, a trusted VPN company, the solution above is NOT a VPN.
I’ve been using Adguard DNS. Is this better?
personally, I’m wary of totally-not-Russian companies operating from Cyprus.
I know about this. I’m someone who lives next to Russia in Baltics, and our blood is boiling with hatred towards them. But here’s the thing - a lot of companies and artist’s whom I love ran away/relocated once it was clear what direction Russia is going in. I have nothing against those who left.
Ukrainians are working for AdGuard afaik.
The moment I see this I delete the game/app and leave a 1 star review. Reap what you sow.
They just keep getting worse. Many of them now take you to the app store instead of closing the ad. Once you’ve gone to the app store and then back to the game, it’ll show the button to close it.
I’ve been noticing that as well. Fucking bullshit. I just want to play a nice serene game of Mahjong or Freecell. Fuck off, Temu. I don’t want to ‘shop like a billionaire’. I don’t want to shop at all while I’m shitting.
Anyone know of a version of either that’s ad free for Android?
I actually paid the 6 bucks or so for the paid version of Chuzzle 2 to get rid of the ads, and they’ve never asked me for another cent in the several years since. Totally worth it.
Mahjong Soul is free and has no ads
I had a look and yeah, I can do without the anime bullshit. I just want a simple mahjong solitaire. The Mobilityware one I’ve been playing is nice, but the ads have gotten to me, and when I looked to remove them it was a monthly subscription, and fuck that.
There is Tenhou, which is more basic, but it feels too serious, and I think it’s only in japanese.
Kemono Mahjong has less anime, and a really good UI for phones and only costs 5USD 1 time, but you can only play against computers or friends, no random match making.
Here’s a great free cell solitare app, called pysolfc
If possible in Vietnam, then we can all have this wherever we are in the world. Europe set out USB-C compliance and everyone is compliant.
VPN 🤔
Theres a major difference though. It is much more costly and complicated to manufacture different hardware for different countries (especially with the eco system of peripherals behind it) than it is to change software for different countries.
Its easy for YouTube or Facebook to set all ads for Vietnam to skippable while maintaining unskippable ads for other countries to maximize profits.
I think you’ve just made my point. If they can all move to USB-C then a few switches at the back end would be far simpler. We just need the gumption to speak out and tell these so-called IT companies what is and isn’t acceptable.
I don’t think you understood what I was trying to say:
The difference is that companys wont do the skippable ads by themselves. Each country will have to do their own legislation to mandate this. Even if Europe would do similiar legislation to Vietnam, YouTube would still show full ads in other countries because they make them way more money.
Which is quite the difference to hardware mandates like USB-C, where a few countries can basically set it as mandatory and the manufacturers will roll it out for all countries because its easier and cheaper to manufacture one model than multiple different versions.
It makes no sense for Apple to produce one iPhone with USB-C and one with lightning financially. But it makes a lot of sense for YouTube to show unskippable ads in every country that allows it to make more money.
I think you’re misunderstanding. I think what the person above is saying is that if Youtube can go back to skippable ads and not pull out of Vietnam or go bankrupt (lol), then places like the EU or even individual EU countries have more than enough leverage to demand this.
Yes, thank you, this is my point.
And the population of Vietnam grew 3(0) sizes that day.
Let’s hope their head of state has kidnap protection.
The US invade Vietnam? Like that would ever happen!
plays fortune son it ain’t me…
I also did a lot of drugs in history class but now that I’m clean, I feel like it was the wrong time.
You can always re-start.
It’s cool, we can pull out of/ lose to “communism” again.
Does Vietnam have oil reserves they can
stealfree?
