MCMC and the slippery slope

While the decision by Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) to prevent access to Malaysia Today website is not likely to be extended to other sites, at least for now, it is still a blatant contravention of the MSC's Bill of Guarantees and it just might be the start of the slippery slope that leads to the banning of future sites.

Perhaps one should not be surprised that Raja Petra Kamarudin's Malaysia Today has the distinction of being the first one to be blocked by the MCMC.

Not only is it difficult for one to separate truth from fiction in many of his postings but more importantly, he has bravely (or some may say, foolishly) gone after the most high-profile targets in the Barisan Nasional by making incendiary accusations time and time again.

It would not be an overstatement to say that RPK is the most influential and popular online persona in Malaysia and the government has not managed to slow him down despite charging him with sedition and criminal defamation.

(Ironically, the government tried to co-opt him by having RPK as the first blogger to be interviewed on RTM after the March general elections as part of their strategy to engage with bloggers)

Perhaps the straw that broke the camel's back was his posting, just prior to the Permatang Pauh by-election, of a statutory declaration relating to Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak and certain references to 'Hindu practices'.

But by blocking access to his site, the BN has once again shown its propensity to score own goals (We should actually set up a running tally to show the number of times which the BN has put the ball in its own net).

Mirror sites to evade ban

Soon after it was announced that MCMC was blocking his site, RPK set up mirror sites and various e-mail nodes and websites (including Malaysiakini ) were alerting his readers of these sites.

Furthermore, the action taken by the MCMC to block his site only added further fuel to the anti-BN sentiment that is prevalent among most bloggers in Malaysia, especially those with the most eyeballs.

If the government thought that blocking RPK would send a strong signal to other bloggers not to go overboard in their anti-BN postings, they thought wrongly.

Not only did the MCMC fail to block access to his site among his Malaysian readers, it also failed to cow the blogosphere, which has been very critical of this move.

In fact, the March election results and the recent Permatang Pauh by-election have only served to embolden the blogging community. With safety in numbers and united by a sense of solidarity, it is not likely that the government, short of a massive crackdown, will be able to silence them.

There is no indication that the MCMC is going to extend this ban to other blog sites. There are just too many anti-BN blog sites out there including many sites run by opposition MPs – Anwar Ibrahim, Jeff Ooi and Lim Kit Siang, just to name a few.

It is even less likely that the MCMC will clamp down on popular news sites like Malaysiakini and Malaysian Insider since this would in effect be blocking commercial activity on the Internet, an action which would have wider repercussions on the viability and openness of the MSC (Multimedia Super Corridor).

Will there be a crackdown?

This is not to say that a 'clampdown' of sorts might not be in the offing. The position of the Abdullah administration towards media freedom has been mixed at best.

While some have argued that under his administration, the media has become freer, one can distinctly remember the times when blogger Nathaniel Tan ( photo, centre ) was arrested for allowing a comment to appear on his blog which accused a certain deputy minister of bribery or the more recent case of blogger Penarik Beca being investigated under the Sedition Act.

One can even make the case that the only thing which has prevented the government from cracking down more since the March elections is that it has other more urgent fires to tend to.

Indeed, there is always looming speculation that a huge crackdown on the scale of Operasi Lalang might just be on the horizon, a not unrealistic expectation given the current political climate. Indeed, if Dr Mahathir Mohamad was still in power, a crackdown would have probably happened already.

The temptation for the MCMC, now that they have set a precedent for blocking access to a site, is to continue down the slippery slope to block other sites in the future, if they publish material which is deemed to be too incendiary.

At the time of writing, we do not anticipate this to occur but one can never be too sure. That's why the slippery slope is something to be very concerned about.

Faced with pressure from politicians who do not understand the concept of mirror sites – or of the Internet, for that matter – they might be forced to ban some other site in the not-too-distant future.

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ONG KIAN MING is a PhD candidate in political science at Duke University and OON YEOH is a writer and new media analyst. You can listen to both of them discuss this topic in their Realpolitik podcast .

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