Blog about Vietnam posted this article from Intellasia:
The Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Culture and Information are to target bloggers and blog-hosting websites in the latest move by the government to restrict what Vietnamese write about and post on the internet.
The chief inspector of the Ministry of Culture and Information Vu Xuan Thanh said the two ministries would issue a joint circular to strictly control and monitor what is written in online blogs, especially views against the state.
Source: Retrieved on July 29, 2007, from http://www.intellasia.com/news/english/articles/governance/111230957.shtml
I agree with Blog about Vietnam that it would be difficult to actually control and monitor bloggers in Vietnam since the majority of blogs are hosted outside of Vietnam. They will have no problems blocking these sites out, though. Yahoo Geocities has been repeatedly blocked from Vietnam until just before the APEC Conference last November in Hanoi. The internet here now is more free. Most internet users worry more about the low bandwidth than anything else.
The problem is that after WTO ascension, would Vietnam want to tackle head on with Yahoo and Google where the majority of Vietnamese bloggers are subscribed. Highly unlikely though Google could come to a similar agreement with Vietnam that it did with China in regards to their search engine.
Most likely, and this is why I would like to see the Vietnamese version of the circular, the Vietnamese government are going after the subversive bloggers who continue to attack the government despite changes within Vietnam.
Hey, this happens in the US as well.