The Future of Online Liberty in Malaysia
I boldly make a prediction: “Online liberty in Malaysia is doomed (in five years)“. I may be wrong about the timeline but I am willing to bet good money that the current liberties we enjoy online will be gone and be dead as the dodo is.
I am basing this prediction on the annual letter from Warren Buffet to his shareholders stating that “fundamentals are definitely eroding in the newspaper industry“. Given the incredible rise of Interweb, his statement is credible in essense. The only variable is when it will happen.
In Malaysia, newspapers are regulated by the government and it is no surprise to find that the largest shareholders in the newspaper companies are the coalition parties which currently dominate the government. These newspapers are widely read by Malaysians and generally are quite biased in not printing what is deemed as “anti-government”. Thus, news is filtered and the incumbent political machinery is guaranteed mindshare of the Malaysian public.
Enter the Interweb, with its glory of free news, blog, podcasts, content sharing sites and what not.
How does the government control the Interweb? It can’t, at least not by regular means. To do so would require subverting the Bill of Guarantees (which prevents censorship by government machinery) Mahathir put in place before stepping down. So other means may include forcing all Malaysians to register before posting anything online (as some governments have been trying to do). Or the government could build the great firewall of Malaysia (which may well provide our unskilled jobless graduates with … jobs that don’t require much skill), ala China. Or it could file lawsuits against those “defamatory bloggers” to generate an environment of fear, ala Singapore (and recent events indicate that it is already happening in Malaysia). Or it could enforce the dreadful laws of Malaysia against bloggers who “threaten national security“, as has happened with Raja Petra Kamarrudion of malaysia-today.net fame.
The point is that they can do anything. And trust me, they will. They have much at stake; far more then our liberties, so they would think, and they will not hesitate to strike when required. The question is: what will we be doing to stop this?