Australia, S’pore-style web filters ‘no good for Indonesia’

Australian and Singaporean Internet-filtering strategies are not appropriate for Indonesia, a blogger says in response to a government proposal to investigate how other countries regulate the web.

Singapore has rigid regulations on Internet censorship and imposes heavy criminal penalties on perpetrators, noted blogger Enda Nasution said on Monday.

“They can do so because they already have a solid legal infrastructure in place, including [laws] banning pornography and defamation of the government,” he told the The Jakarta Post.

“They don’t have freedom of speech in Singapore,” he added.

Internet censorship regulations were still under public scrutiny in Australia, he said.

Communications and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring said on Sunday he would seek to limit Indonesia’s access to pornographic web sites.

“We need to make the same regulation as Australia, the same as Singapore, but not like China, I think,” he told The New York Times.

“I think today the people understand the usefulness of that type of regulation.”

The minister’s statement came in the wake of a scandal involving local pop singer Nazril Ilham, known as Ariel, and his girlfriend, actress Luna Maya. A homemade video that allegedly features the pair spread on the Internet earlier this month and was followed by a second sex video that allegedly features Ariel and television presenter Cut Tari.

The video has spread across Indonesia and schools have inspected students’ mobile phones for the pornographic videos.

The country needs rules that ban negative web content, Tifatul said last week.

The ministry previously proposed regulations aimed at filtering multimedia content. The idea died after a public uproar, which included opposition from the burgeoning online community.

Critics said the regulation would have killed the content provider industry in Indonesia.

“The regulation’s fatal mistake was that [it made] content provi-ders responsible for content, when the creators, writers or those who upload the content [should be accountable],” information technology analyst Onno W. Purbo said in February.

The draft regulation also said that multimedia service providers be banned from distributing, transmitting and making accessible content deemed pornographic or that violated public decency.

The regulation also proposed prohibiting online gambling or “carrying lies and misleading information” on the Internet.

Content providers who failed to remove such content could have had their permits revoked.

Tifatul said that the sex-video scandal was “a good reason” to revive the regulation.