Hanoi - A "blog war" between a famous Vietnamese singer and a blogger accused of defaming her prompted calls in Vietnamese media Monday for stricter control of the internet, particularly personal weblogs. "Abusing blogs violates the law and must be strictly punished," Hoang Huu Luong, head of the government Press Management Department, told local newspaper Capital Security on Monday, adding that the government is preparing new blog regulations.
The very public spat between singer Phuong Thanh and journalist Huong Tra - whose personal blog is one of Vietnam's most widely read - could also become Vietnam's first test case of internet libel if either side sues, as both have threatened.
The dispute started last week when Thanh took issue after Tra posted an item on her blog saying that the pop star's career was so ailing she had to give away tickets to a recent concert, according to the VietnamNet news site.
Thanh's many fans retaliated by flooding Tra's comments section with abusive comments until she took the offending post down. But both women have threatened to sue for damage to their reputations.
Local newspapers have covered the dispute and officials in Vietnam seized the opportunity to call for more state control over blogs, just as the communist government controls access to political and pornographic websites through a firewall.
"It is right to apply state management over blogs," Nguyen Viet Chuc, a former National Assembly member who sat on the Committee on Culture, told Family & Society newspaper.
"Many people are abusing blogs to say negative things about the government and to slander other people's honour," he said.
Vietnam has an estimated 3 million bloggers among its youthful population but so far the government has been unsuccessful in controlling content, since many are hosted on foreign-hosted services such as Yahoo and MSN.
The tiff between Thanh and Tra is not Vietnam's first "blog war."
Last year, a teen-age blogger in Ho Chi Minh City got more than 5,000 abusive and threatening comments after posting an entry saying southern Vietnamese were more sophisticated than Hanoians.
