Arghea Desafti Hapsari, Jakarta – Days after news broke that the Communications and Information Technology Ministry was mulling a regulation to curb Internet-related crime, online opposition has sprung up.
As of Monday evening, a group created on Facebook in opposition to the planned regulation has drawn more than 1,460 members. "Say no to the ministerial regulation on Internet content. Let the Indonesian youths create," one group member commented.
Another member said Communications and IT Minister Tifatul Sembiring should instead work on ways to get villages online and provide affordable connections.
IT experts are also among those shouting down the minister's plan. In a comment made on Feb. 13, IT analyst Onno Widodo Purbo said the planned regulation would kill the entire industry of content providers in the country.
"The fatal mistake in the regulation is that [it requires] content providers to be responsible for their content, when instead it should be the creators, the writers or those who upload the content," he said.
Article 3 of the draft regulation stipulates that providers of multimedia services be banned from distributing, transmitting and making accessible multimedia content deemed pornographic or violating public decency.
Other articles in the regulation prohibit content that offers gambling or that "carry lies and misleading information". Under the regulation, content providers failing to remove such content can have their permitsrevoked.
"These [articles] criminalize the providers and not the creators of the content," Onno said. "[The regulation] needs to be reviewed so it doesn't do this. Can the ministry really punish wordpress.com or blogger.com?" The country's biggest online forum, kaskus.us, is among those at risk of being shut down if the draft regulation is adopted.
Co-founder Andrew Darwis told vivanews.com on Monday that it was beyond his organization's capacity to take responsibility for the content viewed by more than 600,000 visitors to the site every day. "This is disappointing and confusing at the same time," he said.
If the regulation is not revised, he added, "local content providers like us will go through a lot of hassle".
"And anyone who has it in for Kaskus can easily post prohibited content such as porn or items that discriminate against sex, religion or race, anytime they like, and then it'd be us who have to bear responsibility for the content," he said. "Eventually we'd have to go through the legal process."
The Press Council is also against the proposed regulation, with one council member telling Antara that the regulation was in violation of the Constitution, the press law and the broadcasting law.
The ministry, however, disagrees. "The planned regulation on content is not intended to limit press freedom," said ministry spokesman Gatot S. Dewa Broto.
Constitutional Court chief Mahfud M.D. said Sunday such an issue should be ruled on by parliament, and not left to the vagaries of any single ministry.