China's blogs must register

Technically speaking, this even happened before my last entry about China's effort to tighten the control over the Internet. Wil from Blackjournal made me aware of this, and thus, I post about it, nevertheless.

Apparently, the Chinese authorities demanded already on June 10 that bloggers registered in China have to register their blogs or "or face criminal sanctions, and according to the ministry of information a web-based crawler program will monitor all weblogs within China and report unregistered sites".
This clearly can be seen as reaction to the recent upsurge in protests that used e-mail, SMS, chat rooms, or blogs to spread the news and organise.

Question is: Is this the safer Internet they set out to create? Then, well, thank you very much! Not sure if I would want this.

(By Asia Business Consulting)