International Law

Jakarta copies Beijing when it comes to censorship

The Australian examines Indonesia's decision to block YouTube and other video sites:

INDONESIA'S blocking this week of YouTube and other video-sharing websites was a direct copying of repressive Chinese censorship methods but was a strategy doomed to failure, one of the country's most senior journalists predicted.

Endy Bayuni, editor-in-chief of English-language national daily newspaper The Jakarta Post, told a forum that unless the Government was prepared to employ "several hundred thousand" internet police monitoring individual usage, its influence would be limited.

"They might block YouTube, but they can't keep it that way," Mr Bayuni said during a discussion of press freedom featuring several of Indonesia's leading editors.

Most of the country's major internet providers this week voluntarily complied with a government request to block the sites in protest at the 17-minute short film Fitna, made by far-Right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, which has angered Muslims around the world.

There have been protests outside Dutch missions in the country, including a violent one in the major Sumatran city of Medan last week in which security gates were breached.

The banning came amid heated debate over a new information technology law that allows for jail terms and hefty fines for anyone downloading material deemed offensive.

The legislation has outraged journalists and bloggers, with many seeing it as a revival in sharper form of proposed anti-pornography laws that sank under mass nationwide protests more than a year ago.

The editor-in-chief of national newsweekly magazine Tempo, Bambang Harymurti, admitted at the forum, hosted by the Jakarta Foreign Correspondents Club, that the new law had taken the industry by surprise.

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Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on April 14, 2008 (boomark / email).