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 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.
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?