From a defensability perspective (from diego garcia), it wins there as well. Indonesian government has also sunk the most (Chinese) ships operating illegally in its waters so it's government seems most willing/able to assert its sovereignty in SEA (esp considering that these "fishing" boats are likely to be used in lieu of conventional naval forces in any conflict that could erupt initially).
There is internet censorship in all three though, and most of SEA. Philippines Censorship is mostly about pornography and going after some people that talk bad about politicians. Indonesia is same, but they have a more compelling action to stop both and actively DNS hijack if you use default ISP dns configs. Indonesia also actively semi blocks reddit on some ISP's.
If you set the DNS A record correct then it works fine, so it's very trivial to bypass, but that is something to be aware off for the region.
The one thing though is the navy of both the Philippines and Indonesia are not armed, nor strong enough to defend against China. The island infrastructure is critical for their defense, but it will also hamper logistics greatly, still. Satellite communications AFAIK can be routed via USA owned sats so that wouldn't be an issue provided these SEA countries didn't attack first but that just opens up more speculation...
Interesting future the next two decade will be.
Or /etc/hosts, which is what I use to bypass things like reddit or crypto related stuff that's blocked (but can be done for things like pornography).
> The one thing though is the navy of both the Philippines and Indonesia are not armed, nor strong enough to defend against China.
If you exclude the 2 attack subs in the Indonesian Navy (and the 3 more on order [0], which signals intent to build up this capacity), I understand that, but in order to pull off an attack/invasion, much more distance needs to be covered and actively defended (i.e, supply chain for such attacks/invasion must not be ignored) which is a lot easier for China to engage in such operations against Philippines compared to Indonesia.
> Satellite communications AFAIK can be routed via USA owned sats so that wouldn't be an issue provided these SEA countries didn't attack first but that just opens up more speculation...
Satellite links can also be compromised by surveillance spaceships/satellites as well, so even routing through ones own sats is not a panacea.
> Interesting future the next two decade will be.
Agreed.