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Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Icac: Ordinance on Internet cafés not ‘restrictive’
CEBU City Ordinance 1901, which regulates Internet cafés and similar businesses, does not restrict entrepreneurs, an official of the Internet Café Association of Cebu (Icac) said.
“The ordinance provides that they should join our association or any other group of Internet café operators or they can form their own. We have no problem with that,” Icac president Felix Cogal Jr. told Sun.Star Cebu yesterday.
Cebu City Councilor Jose Daluz III wants to amend the ordinance because it is deemed to violate an Internet café operator’s constitutional freedom if he is required to be a member of a specific association.
The ordinance, authored by Councilor Edgardo Labella, regulates the distance of Internet cafés from schools and universities and requires all such establishments in the city to be accredited with Icac. It also enjoins Internet cafés to protect minors from pornographic and satanic sites in the Internet.
Reasons
“One of the reasons some operators don’t join us is our one-time membership fee of P3,000. They say it’s too much. But it’s even cheaper compared to other clubs’ membership fees,” he said.
Icac started with only 12 members but it now has nearly 400.
Cogal noted, though, that a number of Internet cafés have closed shop already due to stiff competition.
“Aside from the price war, the bottleneck now concerns the machines or computers of an Internet café. Normally, gamers go for those that have high-end computers,” he said. (ALC)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (April 18, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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