Malaysia Digital Free Trade Zone | Hacker News Reader

Malaysia Digital Free Trade Zone

mydftz.com

49 pointsdiehell21 comments

You only need to google "Malaysia internet sharia law" to understand why it would be a very poor idea to invest in datacenter/telecom infrastructure in Malaysia, domestically. The government is going the same direction as Turkey recently.

https://www.google.com/search?q=malaysia+internet+sharia+law...

In my opinion it's ethically the same as deciding to operate a datacenter in mainland China and sign up for all the government laws, regulations and oversight that goes with it: You can do it from a technical perspective, but many US based companies have explicitly chosen not to do so based on their own ethical standards.

I agree about Malaysia: it is extremely corrupt and abuses of power are the norm rather than the exception. That said, US and UK government interventionism and surveillance is really not that different to China. The UK is actually worse in many ways. For example, the UK is reported to record all internet traffic and have the most concurrent media gag orders in operation of any nation.

The UK is at this point far worse than the US. At least in the US you can publish very nearly anything on your own servers, fully self hosted, and not get it taken down unless it is explicitly making terroristic threats or hosting child porn. There's a huge amount of first amendment precedent set for parody, satire and generally offensive things (Hustler Magazine parodying Jerry Falwell, for example) that meets the criteria for being protected by the first amendment.

The UK at least pays lip service to being a secular society. Where it gets scary to me is politicians in religious countries actively implementing sharia law in relations to internet/telecom to appease a fundamentalist base.

I agree that the UK is going a very worrying direction, forcing retail ISPs to operate a "porn filter" and have it enabled by default, and so forth.

It's not even just the government.

I wouldn't store any confidential/secure data in a country that you can bribe cops for relatively trivial sums in. That does end up writing off most of the world for storage, admittedly.

Yeah there is a huge difference. If you have a datacenter in Grant County, WA, attempting to bribe the police will only result in them arresting you and calling the feds.

Most startups in Malaysia use services like S3 storage and host their databases elsewhere, which are not based in Malaysia (usually Singapore, Japan, US, etc.) At my first startup job my boss insisted to never store any data in Malaysia because he was kinda paranoid. If a Malaysian startup does that is it still a concern for international users?

I'm Malaysian and I'm wondering what the perception is for an international user if a SaaS business is known to be from Malaysia.

For the record, bigwig companies like Grab had its roots in Malaysia. Only when they started getting big they moved to Singapore, perhaps due to such perception issues, and also talent.

Anyway, I've lived and grown up in Malaysia, and all I can say is that while the system ain't perfect, but daily life goes on with normalcy and I'm not so sure about the FUD portayed in comments.

Malaysia has a dual legal system so any sharia law there doesn't apply to non-muslim (40% of the population).

I also don't think the comparison to mainland China is warranted. Mainland China is far worse when it comes to censorship and to tightly controlling anyone hosting data on servers in China. I used to have a company in China and for example if you host user submitted data that are publicly viewable you had to have a system in place to censor anything critical of the government. And, if I remember correctly since I left, companies are required to get and validate a user's phone number when registering to be able to track any user identity if requested. This is way worse than Malaysia.

Even in term of blocking, Malaysia only ever blocks by blocking a the DNS level (same as most European countries), they don't have anything equivalent to the great firewall and they don't prevent users from using DNS servers outside of Malaysia.

Malaysia is definitely not a perfect country, the government is corrupted and in a truly democratic country Najib would not have kept power nor would Anwar have been sent to prison but it's much more free and much closer to a democracy than China.

"Malaysia has a dual legal system so any sharia law there doesn't apply to non-muslim."

The important disclaimer to such statement is "For Now". There's guarantee that will not change in the future.

With 40% of the population being non muslim and the huge discontent changing that would cause, I think it's extremely unlikely that it would change. Even PAS isn't advocating for sharia bills to apply to non-muslims.

This is the first time I heard about "Malaysia internet sharia law". Does it mean the law being applied to internet usage?

As an alternative I want to mention the very convenient Dubai Internet City, which is a free zone next to the Dubai Marina district. I was there, left a good impression on me, and the also have no big problem when you trade with other non-freezone companies in the UAE. Microsoft, Oracle and IBM all have a place there.

Ditto, relocated there from Doha. It is conveniently close to a large cluster of AirBnBs, which helps out big time while waiting for a resident's permit.

How long did it take you to get a resident's permit? Seemed to me like this process would be quite fast.

It probably could be fast, if you have all your ducks lined up. UAE immigration wanted me to go back to Canada to pick up a fresh notarized copy of my educational and criminal records.

I really don't understand why this kind of thing can't be done over a video conference, and then printed, stamped, scanned, emailed, printed locally. But, I got a nice little trip to my hometown out of it, so whatever.

Is this just a normal free trade zone with "digital" tacked onto the name?

No, see, you can file your customs paperwork digitally.

Cynically: No, it's "Cyber" prepended to "jaya" (used to mean "city" in Malaysia, but apparently derived from Sanskrit for 'victory', ie. a place where a battle was won) - ie. a rebranding of "The city at the place of the victory of the battle of Cyber" to "digital free trade zone".

Realistically: Maybe in part. It looks like in part they are trying to challenge Singapore for air freight logistics. Unfortunately KLIA is miles from KL and nobody really lives out there, so even though you get "express freight handling" the only major nearby markets accessible by road are Singapore and KL (plus some second-tier peninsular Malaysian cities) and in the former case you have to pay to cross another border.

Amusingly: On their promotional video they tout the future as being "borderless" - quite funny as KL is known to be a global center for forged, modified and stolen passports and other identity documentation.

Sounds like a branding refresh for the Multimedia Super Corridor: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Malaysia

It is.

re: first video on page: I like Jack Ma and often agree with him, but his view on globalization is I think incorrect. Sure globalization has helped lift many people in the world out of poverty (good thing!) but I can't buy into giving up countrys' rights to have their own laws and I think preserving local culture is important.

So, globalization is a 'mixed bag.'

Oh, when I read the title, I wrongly thought it's Digital-Free Trade Zone, a trade zone without any digital methods. :D

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