After Indonesia’s biggest internet service provider, Telkom, decided to unilaterally block Netflix from all of its services (for their customers’ “protection”), the rest of us streaming media lovers have been living in fear that the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (Kemenkominfo) would follow Telkom’s lead and decide to have Netflix blocked entirely from Indonesia.
Fortunately it looks like that won’t be the case. Recently, Kemenkominfo Minister Rudiantara said that his ministry would create new rules governing Netflix and similar foreign internet streaming services which should come out next month.
“God willing, the regulations will be ready by March March. It will be designed in consultation with the public first, though this is not up to public,” Rudiantara said last Thursday as quoted by Kompas.
“We will coordinate with the Ministry of Education and Culture about the content as well as the Ministry of Economic Affairs regarding their existence as a business enterprise,” he added.
Rudiantara made the announcement after a meeting with members of the House of Representatives about the issue. Interestingly. a politician from the National Mandate Party, Budi Youyastri, argued that Telkom was in the wrong for blocking Netflix unilaterally and that they should have waited for instructions from the government for taking such drastic action. He said tha Telkom should unblock Netflix until the government had hammered out the new regulations.
However Rudiantara, who has been reluctant to criticize Telkom in the past, defended the block as a business decision that Telkom had a right to make on its own. He added that the block had consequences, both good and bad, for the state-run telcom.
Rudiantara went on to say that services such as Netflix do not fall under of the existing regulations including those covering censorship as those apply only to broadcast content and not streaming content from the internet. So he said that new regulations would have to be drawn up with Netflix categorized as a electronic system operator (PSE).
Hopefully Rudiantara is serious when he says he will consult the public about the regulations. When was the last time the government actually polled the Indonesian people asking them if they really want the government to censor all manners of media content and by whose moral standards they want that content to be censored? Clearly many people think that Indonesian censors go way too far right now.
Netflix already has parental guard features to protect kids from risque content. The government should let responsible parents use that to protect their kids as they see fit and let responsible adults choose what they want to watch for themselves. Unless the government just wants to keep using their own “parental controls” on all Indonesians.
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