Indonesia beefs up anti-online gambling technology

Indonesia’s anti-online gambling efforts could soon get a technical boost as the government seeks greater control over its ability to block unauthorized websites.

On Monday, Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology announced plans to beef up its so-called ‘web crawler’ to better police the interwebz for content that the government doesn’t like, which ranges from pornography to gambling to dangerous political ideas.

The Ministry is looking to enhance its existing Cyber Drone 9 – which sounds like straight-to-video Seal Team 6 knockoff but is actually the government’s online artificial intelligence system –  into an omniscient Judge Dredd censorship titan by sometime next year. That is, if the Ministry’s Dr. Evil-inspired request for ONE BILLION RUPIAH (US$69.2m) in funding meets with the approval of the government’s budget hawks.

Indonesia’s government seems to have grown weary of asking local internet service providers and telecom outfits to block websites the government has identified as posing a threat to societal order. Since 2018, Cyber Drone 9 has tagged 1.3m websites with its scarlet letter, of which 220k involved some form of gambling.