Big Tech can be prone to keep away from negotiating such rules with ASEAN as a bloc, given their “divide and conquer” method to preserving income and the cash they’ve invested in complying with legal guidelines in particular person jurisdictions, analysts mentioned .
At a seminar on Malaysia’s efforts to make the web safer final Friday (Jan 17), Malaysia’s Deputy Communications Minister Teo Nie Ching mentioned a “key agenda” for his nation’s ASEAN presidency is to to contain the bloc and “unify” the authorized frameworks of member states. on Internet regulation.
“And, in fact, we use it to truly negotiate with the platform supplier. We imagine this may be extra highly effective,” he mentioned on the seminar held on the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore.
While Teo highlighted Malaysia’s efforts to make platforms extra accountable for on-line security by licensing necessities for all social media and web messaging platforms with at the very least eight million registered customers within the nation, he believes there are “many different challenges” forward.
“We solely have 34 million individuals and it will likely be tough for smaller nations to truly have interaction with the tech giants,” he added.
“But if ASEAN is ready to act as a bloc, then we imagine our negotiating energy will likely be a lot, a lot larger.”
His feedback got here simply weeks after Malaysia formally took over the ASEAN presidency on January 1.
ASEAN consists of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Last August, in an interview with Malaysian information company Bernama, Teo urged ASEAN nations to unite in an effort to strengthen their negotiating energy with social media giants and successfully fight the rising drawback of on-line crime within the area.
While Teo had hoped this subject can be on the agenda of final 12 months’s ASEAN summit beneath Laos’ presidency, the president’s assertion launched on October 9 touched on on-line job scams and cybercrime, however made no point out of the platforms of social media.
In current months, Malaysia has launched into an rising push to manage Big Tech, beginning with class licensing necessities that got here into impact on January 1.
It has additionally accepted harder sanctions and broader powers to amend the Communications and Multimedia Act, drawing backlash from civil society teams, and is mulling the introduction of a web-based security regulation that critics worry may additional increase suppression of on-line content material.
HOW COULD MALAYSIA DO IT?
Malaysia’s renewed effort to unite the authorized constructions of ASEAN members towards Big Tech is “very formidable, though not not possible,” mentioned Shafizan Mohamed, affiliate professor of communications on the International Islamic University Malaysia.
“I feel, as president of ASEAN, it’s a good alternative for Malaysia to take this main function, to create momentum for a regional method towards Big Tech,” he informed CNA.
Benjamin Loh, a lecturer in media and communications at Taylor University, mentioned Malaysia had a “good likelihood” of succeeding in its efforts.
“While ASEAN typically struggles to search out frequent floor on account of variations in governance kinds and ideologies, there seems to be rising authoritarianism throughout the area that sees social media as a standard risk,” he informed CNA.
