Opinion

Indonesia Follows China: The Great Firewall and Sexuality Control

Indonesia, just like China, just has recently begun its internet censorship. Unless you aware already, China actually has so-called “Great Firewall of China”, a jargon used to indicate the heavy censorship toward values that aren’t allowed by Communist Party.

Anyway, Indonesia also more or less, will start its own firewall. On 11 April 2008, Ministry of Communication and Informatic of Indonesia has asked google to remove content that are considered forbidden according to the perception of Indonesia’s government. Yes, please distinguish between civilians and government. Government has value that they want to force to be put on civillians, religion and sexuality control are the keywords.

This is after all, country with moslem majority, it wouldn’t be surprising if there democracy here, is still limited. Religion has been long issue and source of criticism because its perfect uselessness. Religion has been long time a tool of justification toward repression for most of people here. Let’s say for example, you’re agnostic, you’re good man and you want to marry with another agnostic person. Sadly my friend, it’s surrealistic dream. The law explicitly forbids and doesn’t acknowledge atheist or agnostic. In cultural root it is worse. Call yourself atheist or agnostic here, and there is good chance you will be considered as devil, satan or some lost lamb.

What about sexuality control? Well it’s also bad news, since Indonesia is patriarchal country, they always percept is woman is source of pornography. There is unclarity what is considered pornography and I doubt they will make plan to distinguish homo/hetero/pornography very soon. Sexuality, in my opinion, is personal matter, and I think government shouldn’t touch this area, it’s violation of private space if you ask me.

These conservatives, they all should living in asexual community. Is it too hard to accept fact that sexuality is a private thing? Instead to repress others with baseless value, why don’t they instead, control the content to protect possibility of child pornography and pedophilia? I think this is more important issue than sexuality control. Also you should noted that sexuality control itself, is amelioration of sexual repression. I don’t use the word sexual repression in this post the condition is much better in Indonesia compared to the woman in Arab.

_________

Salah satu yang menarik dari perkembangan internet di China adalah adanya penyensoran content yang bertentangan dengan nilai-nilai partai komunis China. Topik yang dianggap tabu di internet misalnya adalah Tiananmen 1989 dan Demokrasi. Pengguna internet, bahkan di warnet juga diminta untuk melakukan registrasi agar mereka bisa dilacak dan dapat diminta pertanggungjawaban saat mengakses atau menyuarakan protes kepada pemerintah China.

Keadaan itu mungkin akan kita rasakan kalau Soeharto masih memerintah kita sekarang. Pembatasan konten atas nama stabilitas, pemaksaan nilai dari elite kepada penduduknya.

Nah, ini perkembangan yang menjengkelkan dari internet Indonesia, seperti yang juga dibahas mas sigit. Menkominfo ternyata meminta Google untuk memblokir akses-akses situs yang dinyatakan terlarang oleh pemerintah Indonesia.

(11 April 2008)

Jakarta, 11/4/2008 (Kominfo-Newsroom)

3 Comments

speak up

Add your comment below, or trackback from your own site.

Subscribe to these comments.

Be nice. Keep it clean. Stay on topic. No spam.

You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

*Required Fields