When Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology — the consolidated successor to the old Ministry of Information and Communications after Hanoi's early-2025 government restructuring — ordered domestic ISPs in May 2025 to block Telegram, the move was unprecedented in scale. It was the first time a major end-to-end-encrypted messaging service serving tens of millions of users in Southeast Asia had been cut off by a national government outside China. Twelve months on, with Telegram still inaccessible on the main networks of Viettel, VNPT and MobiFone, the episode has stopped looking like an isolated enforcement action and started looking like the operating model for how Vietnam intends to govern foreign platforms for the rest of the decade.
What actually happened
The block was triggered, on paper, by Telegram's non-compliance with three sets of demands: take-down of content the authorities consider illegal, identity verification of users alleged to be involved in fraud or what Vietnamese law calls "anti-state" activity, and broader compliance with Decree 147/2024/ND-CP, which took effect on 25 December 2024. Decree 147 requires cross-border platforms operating in Vietnam to authenticate Vietnamese users using a domestic phone number or national ID, to appoint a local point of contact, and to remove unlawful content within 24 hours of a government notice. Layered on top is the 2018 Cybersecurity Law and Decree 53/2022/ND-CP, which together push platforms toward storing Vietnamese user data on Vietnamese soil and standing up a local representative office within the jurisdiction's legal reach.
Telegram, whose architecture is built around minimal data retention and resistance to government access requests, declined to comply. ISPs were given until early June 2025 to implement the block, and the platform has remained largely unreachable on major Vietnamese networks since. VPN usage has reportedly surged, with several VPN providers citing Vietnam as one of their fastest-growing markets in late 2025 — a familiar dynamic that, as Pakistan's experience with its own PTA-led VPN crackdown has shown, governments increasingly try to close off as a second front.
Why this matters beyond Vietnam
The Telegram block is the sharp edge of a slower-moving project. Hanoi has been pressuring Meta, Google, TikTok and X for several years to localise data, accept government takedown requests at scale, and accept liability through locally established entities. Decree 147 weaponised that pressure by giving the state a clean legal trigger — failure to authenticate users or remove content in 24 hours — that can be applied to any cross-border service.
Three features of the Vietnam approach travel especially well to other capitals:
- Identity-bound access. Tying platform use to a verified national ID converts every account into a unit the state can subpoena, deanonymise, or prosecute. It also makes pseudonymity — long understood as a precondition for whistleblowing, dissent and journalism — a regulatory anomaly rather than the default.
- 24-hour takedown windows. Short, fixed removal deadlines under threat of network-level blocking outsource adjudication of "illegal" content to the platform's compliance team, with no judicial review in the loop. Germany's NetzDG pioneered the model; Vietnam has stripped out the procedural guardrails.
- Infrastructure-level enforcement. Where the EU's Digital Services Act fines non-compliant platforms, Vietnam simply orders ISPs to drop the traffic. The cost falls on users, who lose the service overnight, rather than on the platform's bottom line.
The proportionality problem
There is a real public-interest case for action against fraud rings, child sexual abuse material, and coordinated criminal activity on messaging platforms. Telegram in particular has been criticised — including in democratic jurisdictions, most visibly through the August 2024 arrest of CEO Pavel Durov in France — for slow cooperation with law enforcement on serious crime. Reasonable regulation should push platforms to engage with legitimate criminal process.
But blocking an entire encrypted service nationwide because the operator will not hand over user identities or remove content on government demand is not proportionate enforcement. It is a collective penalty imposed on every lawful user of the service — small businesses coordinating on Telegram channels, diaspora families, journalists, civil-society groups — to coerce one corporate actor. It also erodes the security of communications generally: once the precedent is set that an end-to-end-encrypted service can be removed from the public internet by ministerial order, the same logic can be applied to Signal, WhatsApp, or any successor.
What a proportionate alternative looks like
A policy that took both rule-of-law and public safety seriously would: (1) channel takedown and identification demands through independent judicial authorisation, with published reasons; (2) limit liability to content the platform has been formally notified about and has refused to act on within a defined window, with appeal rights; (3) protect end-to-end encryption and pseudonymous use as default settings, narrowing exceptions to specific, serious offences; and (4) reserve network-level blocking for cases where less restrictive measures have demonstrably failed and where a court — not a ministry — has authorised the step.
Vietnam's Telegram block fails on every one of these. It is being treated, in capitals from Islamabad to Jakarta to Ankara, as proof of concept that a determined government can simply switch a major encrypted platform off and absorb the diplomatic cost. The longer that proof of concept stands unchallenged, the more attractive it becomes — and the harder it gets to defend the open, interoperable internet that has been the precondition for Vietnam's own remarkable digital economy.