Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
This week, the Malaysian Parliament went back into session to consider a series of amendments to the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 that, if passed, will further chill online speech and worsen the Malaysian regime’s persecution of journalists, bloggers, and activists. The amendments may pass as early as next week, even before the public has had an opportunity to see them. We’ve written about the planned amendments before, based on the scattered information we had about them from leaks and rumors, but local activists have brought to light another likely feature of the planned amendments that is equally or more concerning: a requirement to register political blogs and websites.
There are numerous problems with such a requirement. Most fundamentally, the need for registration of any online publisher is an unwarranted incursion on freedom of expression. A 2003 Joint Declaration of intergovernmental rapporteurs on freedom of expression and the media specifies that “journalists should not be required to be licensed or to register.” The reasons are obvious: by withholding registration or threatening to do so, the government can silence dissenters and skew public discourse in its favor.
But even leaving the freedom of expression issue aside, on a simply practical level the maintenance of a register of political blogs, news portals, and websites is an unmanageable task. What is the definition of a political blog? Does this also cover a personal blog which occasionally comments on current events? What is a news portal? Does it include a news aggregation website? However these questions are answered, there will be so many edge cases that the registration system is likely to be ineffective, as well as casting a grey legal cloud over the online speech of ordinary Malaysians. Read more