PayPal and Steam are banned in Indonesia | Hacker News Reader

PayPal and Steam are banned in Indonesia

gamerbraves.com

39 pointsaltilunium32 comments

From the google translation, this seems like Indonesia is completely closing it's internet from the outside world, except for companies that apply to do business in Indonesia. People get all bent out of shape when the Chinese government writes an order that censors specific search queries, or keeps people from being able to post certain words, bans a few sites, but Indonesia detaches itself from the wider internet entirely and there aren't any English-language articles about it.

Indonesia is the next most populous country after the US. It's China, India, the US, and Indonesia.

The fact that Kominfo specifically and individually banned Steam, DOTA, and CSGO is... interesting. The latter two are both games published by Valve; I'm curious why they would be singled out like this, beyond their popularity.

The government is using the top 100 IP traffic ranking data. That's why servers that related directly to DOTA and CSGO are singled out.

I'm not sure that's it. Both games are hosted on Valve's servers, as is the Steam storefront and client; there isn't any obvious way that Kominfo could distinguish between the three.

If they are basing their blocks on IP flow data, though, I wonder if their block on "Amazon" is actually going to hit AWS. That'd certainly be interesting to see.

I don't think they are specifically targeting these companies but they are signaling their intention to begin targeting. They wouldn't take this step without getting the big guys to register (google/fb/aws/etc...). Now they want more of these companies to comply.

I don't see that in the article, where is it?

It's in the table a few paragraphs in. Here's a direct link:

http://web.kominfo.go.id/sites/default/files/users/4752/Daft...

I see a list of ten things, presumably the top 10 by some measure (unless they're banning exactly 10?), of which those are just a few, and not near the top. Are they maybe just popular services? I wonder if a list of 20 would include World of Warcraft or (checks notes) whatever games Origin is required for?

I assume in a country the size of Indonesia, with its millions of players, does that mean everyone has to use a vpn now? Or access servers hosted outside Indonesia?

perhaps they could VPN to use the service (for multiplayer/download etc), but how would they purchase it without going through a financial institution local to indonesia which would then cause the card holder to get rejected?

It's been a long time since I was a child trying to run a business, but gift cards as a payment proxy worked well back then.

I'm curious, how do you sell those gift cards after receiving them as payment? Are there legitimate businesses that don't just give you cents on the dollar? Or is this something that only works on a small scale until your private needs to order on Amazon, Netflix, etc. are met?

Not selling. As a 15 year old I had no access to a debit card or credit card. In order to buy computer equipment, pay hosting fees and pretend to be a 19 year old computer programming student, I needed to buy visa gift cards and use them for regular purchases. It wasn't until I was doing it for two years that I was allowed a debit card.

Some background information on the MR5 regulation, which this sounds like a consequence of: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/indonesias-proposed-on...

The linked article is not in English. Anyone care to provide an FL:DR?

The Indonesian government has a register of internet services that can operate in the country. If you are not in the register you are blocked in Indonesia. If you don't submit to any government requests they can kick you off the register. For instance if Twitter does not provide the government the details of a specific user then they can be blocked.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/indonesias-proposed-on...

Oh I thought Australia was bad. Indonesia might as well just have permanent read-only access to the companies they allow, should the companies give in. I'm going to guess these rights will be abused big time for favours and corrupt government employees grabbing data for money. What wonderful times we live in.

In short : any foreign based online services will be blocked if they dont formally register to the Indonesian goverment.

Today, the goverment is blocking the unregistered top 100 traffic online service. But, they will continue to do so, to the top 1000 and top 10.000 and so forth.

Article 4 (1) : The obligation of Private Scope PSE to register as referred to in Article 2 paragraph (1) also applies to Private Scope PSE which is established under the laws of another country or which is permanently domiciled in another country but: provides services within the territory of Indonesia, conducts business in Indonesia, and/or its Electronic System is used and/or offered in the territory of Indonesia

Article 7 (2) : In the event that the Private Scope PSE does not register, the Minister shall impose an administrative sanction in the form of Termination of Access to the Electronic System (access blocking).

List of registered online services : https://pse.kominfo.go.id/home/pse-asing

This is actually pretty funny. There are less than 300 services registered, and a nontrivial number of them are individual mobile games, or duplicates of other registrations. (For example, the phone manufacturer Vivo has something like 18 registrations for individual subdomains.) If the mandate is that every foreign web site or service register... well, that definitely isn't happening.

I think they simply want to close doors to websites that don’t follow their laws regarding the media, or sell services without paying applicable taxes.

If Indonesia is anything like my country, the majority of US and EU businesses already refuse to accept transactions anyways and many information portals block our IPs anyways. Add in a language barrier, and it’s no real loss to restrict the foreign market to only known and registered parties.

There's a website that tracks popular websites and their status: https://kominfod.angelo.fyi/

Basically the internet services provider need to register to the government. That's the TLDR. They were given time to register, and some of them didn't bother to do, hence what happened.

I admire Indonesian government to stand up against big tech. Data is a matter of national security and they shouldn't have their citizens' data in the hand of foreign owned entities.

That being said, it seems that the action here is a bit harsh.

HN readers, what would you do if you were an Indonesian government, in this situation?

You really think this is the government looking out for you? Sounds to me like they are working towards Chinese style 'comply with the government or GTFO' for all outside businesses. Except the Indonesian market is much smaller than China, so there's not as much leverage as China does get.

Though I'll give you one thing, I had to figure out microservices at a previous job because the regulation on Indonesian data was much more intense than usual. Had to keep the data in the country, as well as only process it in-country. The net effect was that the data went not just to the US (main cloud co), but also to China (AliCloud)... Not sure if that was a net benefit, didn't feel that way to me.

The number of registered services here disagree: https://kominfod.angelo.fyi

I'm actually surprised that many companies did comply...

What is there to disagree? Companies did sign up with Chinese shells etc too, but staying there is tricky as well.

This just shows they are happy enough to provide yet another government with a backdoor to your data. I'm not surprised, but disappointed for sure.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/02/indonesias-proposed-on...

The total number of non-Indonesian sites that registered was 282 according to this press release. Which means that every site in the world outside of Indonesia will be banned inside Indonesia (or every "platform" which probably includes every blog that takes comments) except for 282 sites, most of which seem to provide crucial infrastructure to websites in general i.e. Indonesian sites require them to operate.

Realistically, it's a lot less than 282 sites. There are a lot of mobile apps (mostly games, registered under Play Store URLs), and a lot of duplicates. There's almost nothing on the list that looks like infrastructure, TBH.

Related HN submission : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32115927

We have deep respect for other languages but HN is an English language site, so please post articles in English.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Can i still edit the post's url?

At least, with this one :

https://www.gamerbraves.com/steam-epic-and-other-websites-ar...

Sure! changed from https://kominfo.go.id/content/detail/43385/siaran-pers-no-30... now.

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