On Blocking The Internet

Last night, I couldn’t access Reddit site. The weird thing was that I could access the landing page, http://reddit.com but couldn’t access categories under it. I’m using Bolt and to those of you surfing through other ISPs, you might or might not get the same result as I am.

This reminds me of recent action from Kominfo ministry, Tifatul Sembiring who’s blocking Vimeo from the Indonesian users. So, let’s talk a bit about this blocking thingy.

You don’t. You shouldn’t.

However, I understand that porn sites are dangerous to our child, our next generation who watching porn instead of making something else. Learn sciences. Teach and share their knowledge. Practice for the Olympic games. Read books. Write a novel. Build a startup. And much everything else which has nothing to do with porn (except, they decide to build something around porn. It’s a different story).

So if you want to block that porn, just block that single porn (which would be difficult of course because there’s a huge amount of them and the effort is worthless), not the whole platform.

This is why I always questioning the ministry’s question, “Internet kencang untuk apa, tweeps?” (what is the purpose of the fast Internet, tweeps?)

Mr. Sembiring, I might not know where were you when we have only had 56kbps to browse the Internet. I also didn’t know whether you understand this and how it worked and what kind of pain we endured when some beeps indicating connection failed occured. I might lucky to get early access to the university network and use lynx to browser the Internet faster, but where were you at that time? Do you know that our speed today, is better than years ago and with better connection means better business, better research and better communication?

Your question about the purpose of the fast Internet should be asked years ago when we just only have a few sites to open, namely Yahoo, Altavista, MySpace, Friendster as well as mIRC and Yahoo Messenger and another old-style resources such as Gopher and BBS. Today, that question, I told you Mr. Sembiring, isn’t relevant anymore. Way irrelevant.

So, please go back to the way you are, as a politician, and stay away from the Internet. There’s a lot of great things happening in another side of the world and you’re still asking about the purpose of the fast Internet.

Go home, you’re drunk.

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