At today’s Startup Asia Jakarta (which we’re media partners with, btw), one of the most highly anticipated speakers of the day was the new Minister of Communication and Information Technology, Rudiantara. The minister was scheduled to speak later in the day but ended up speaking just after lunch (apparently President Joko Widodo asked to meet with him this evening).
Rudiantara, who has a great deal of experience working in Indonesia’s telecom industry, talked a bit about his interest in learning about the country’s startup scene and ways the government could encourage its growth.
But the topic everybody really wanted to hear about was the new minister’s position on the government’s policy of Internet censorship. Rudiantara was prepared for this topic and even offered to speak about the most controversial site that the government is currently blocking: video sharing site Vimeo.
Rudiantara started off by reminding the audience that he’s only been the Menkominfo for four weeks. He admitted that he was unaware of Vimeo and its ban when he started the job, and it was only after he had held the position for a week that people started asking him about it.
As we’ve written about before, Rudiantara says he has reached out to Vimeo regarding the block with the possibility of removing it “under certain conditions.” But at that time, he hadn’t heard back from the US-based company.
Today, Rudiantara gave the audience of tech industry professionals an update on the situation. Apparently he has already had a video conference with Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor in which the minister asked Trainor to “help me to help you.”
“We are now in the process of discussion with Vimeo about how not to allow Indonesians access to the pornographic content,” Rudiantara told the audience.
Vimeo has always maintained that it does not allow pornographic material on its site, but it does allow for nudity used in artistic contexts. The definition of what is pornographic in Indonesia (or at least what the government considers pornographic) would tend to include any form of nudity, so it may be difficult to reconcile the difference.
Nonetheless, Rudiantara seemed optimistic that the two parties could reach an understanding, saying “We are making good progress with Vimeo.”
Rudiantara said the government was working on refining the guidelines for what websites should be censored on the internet. He also said he wanted the whole censorship process to be more transparent to the public.
We got the impression from his discussion that Rudiantara, who is an old school telcom industry guy, would rather focus on issues of infrastructure and entrepreneurship then messy matters of censorship and freedom of speech. But he seems willing to listen to a wide variety of different parties (saying he wants to take a “multi-stakeholder approach” to regulations) and get their input, which already makes him much better than his unyielding predecessor, Tifatul Sembiring. He said he even met with the group of people who have gone to the supreme court to sue the government over its website blocking policy.
We’re starting to get why Jokowi picked this guy – hopefully he can help steer Indonesia’s internet policies in the right direction. We’re not expecting him to unblock porn or anything, but after Vimeo could we please do something about Reddit?
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