Minister of Communication and Information: Increase Digital TV Adoption, Erase Pornography

After his appointment as Minister of Communication and Informatics (Menkominfo) last October, Rudiantara is now stepping on the gas working on two projects at once namely the program to accelerate the adoption of digital TV, and the eradication of pornographic content in the country.

Based on reports from Indotelko, the utilization of a bandwidth of 112 MHz perched on a frequency of 700 MHz is still being used for analog TV broadcasts at this time, the Minister of Communication and Informatics Rudiantara hopes to be able to allocate these frequencies for later use by the network mobile broadband 4G LTE.

Standard used by countries using digital TV systems / Wikimedia

"I still want to try the digitalization program on TV, which could happen in 2018. Indeed, there are legal issues going on, but we are continuing our efforts," said the Minister of Communication and Informatics Rudiantara, quoting from Indotelko yesterday (15/12). In his efforts this time, Rudiantara faced a few problems related to law. Because it was previously known that the Supreme Court postponed Ministerial Regulation of the Ministry of Communication and Informatics No.22/2011 regarding the Implementation of Digital Television.

Meanwhile, Rudiantara stated his vow to return to blocking all pornographic content on the Internet, continuing what Tifatul Sembiring had tried even though it was considered inappropriate.

The filtering that Rudiantara requested for the censored party might be a temporary solution at this time. Unfortunately, it turns out that many other sites have also been blocked by the government, which is not even effective in its implementation. It was almost impossible for Rudiantara to request filtering features for each blocked site. Maybe realizing this, his party took a shortcut by blocking the entire service.

"If there are keywords that contain the slightest element of pornography, the search engine will automatically close," said the Minister of Communication and Information Rudiantara, quoting from Tempo.co. Even so, he did not explain more clearly how the government was able to force search engines like Google to close the site.

Restricting pornography is not an easy matter, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, despite the fact that blocking Internet sites is not an effective method. Because whatever the current government is trying to do is they only make it difficult for people to access a lot of useful information, without really succeeding in blocking pornographic content.

Rudiantara previously promised to unblock access to the video content site Vimeo which has long been a polemic regarding pornography. Please note that this access release contains one condition for Vimeo to technically provide pornographic special filters on its site. This approach was actually quite well received by the community.