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Indonesian internet ‘partly free’: Global report
According to the Freedom House report, Indonesia scored 49 out of 100, putting it in the bracket of “partly free” countries within the survey period between June 2021 and May 2022.
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Protesters rally outside the Communications and Information Ministry office in Jakarta on Aug. 23, 2019, demanding the government unblock internet access in Papua and West Papua. (AFP/Dasril Roszandi)
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ndonesia’s internet freedom remains “partly free” amid threats to the internet from data breaches and movements toward more stringent control by governments around the world, a study by Freedom House has revealed.
The United States-funded think tank last week unveiled the Freedom of the Net 2022 report subtitled “Countering an Authoritarian Overhaul of the Internet” which assessed the level of internet freedom of 70 countries around the world.
According to the report, Indonesia scored 49 out of 100, putting it in the bracket of “partly free” countries within the survey period between June 2021 and May 2022. It gained one point from last year’s score of 48.
Freedom House noted that obstruction to internet access still occurred, such as infrastructure-related disruptions in Papua and West Papua alongside government, political, legal and security activities, citing SAFENet’s Indonesia digital rights report in 2022; as well as in Wadas village, Purworejo regency in Central Java in which residents using social media to coordinate protest against a mine construction project experienced connectivity restrictions for three days in February.
The report also noted that there were still cases of internet users’ rights being violated, one of which was Muhammad Kece’s 10-year prison sentence in April over YouTube videos deemed to be blasphemous.
But even after the June to May coverage period, the report noted that the Indonesian government had started demanding tech companies to comply with a regulation that imposed takedown and registration documents briefly blocking platforms failing to comply, namely the Communications and Information Ministerial Regulation No. 5/2020 on electronic service providers (ESP) that was enforced starting July 2022.
The report also noted that government and private websites had become subject to hacking and data breaches. Quoting SAFEnet, about 193 digital attacks occurred in 2021, many of them targeting activists and journalists. Hacking, data breaches and phishing made up over 80 percent of digital attacks in 2021, the report found.
