Several days ago, youtube, multiply, rapidshare, and some other websites were banned in Indonesia. Internet users in Indonesia got a notification from their ISP that those URLs can’t be accessed until further notice according to government’s direction.

I will not discussed about the root cause, which I believe already became a hot topic in other blogs and Indonesia’s news portals. It was very interesting (and surprising) decision made by government. I’m questioning whether they aware that they can’t restrict people to go to where ever they want in www world; even if their destination URLs were banned. People can always use Internet proxy (as it shared in several mailing lists when this restriction happened), search from other sources, ask other people to download the contents and send to an Internet disk for Indonesia’s Internet users to download, and many other things that Internet geeks can think of. Internet has the most sophisticated contents distribution channels. If they really think of internet censorship, they really need to think of investing great amount of money and build a system like ‘great firewall of china’.

It’s really sad (for me and other internet users in Indonesia), to know a respectful IT institution in Indonesia had taken such step in order to do internet censorship. I wonder whether they understand how a content can be distributed in www world.

Looking at this situation, highlighted an old issue on how bad Indonesia need the right man behind the gun. Indonesia need a group of professionals that willing to ‘donate’ part of their busy time to at least be a pressure group in order to make things right in our beloved country.

are you one of them? do you care about your country? or you only want to state your comments but not give any solution?