Two new Internet Atlas reports: Malaysia and Indonesia
Southeast Asia's two heavyweight digital economies. Both building serious infrastructure. Both arriving at the same destination by completely different roads.
Malaysia reads like a success story until you get to the legal chapters. 5G past 82% population coverage, IPv6 adoption above 70%, median mobile download speed near 200 Mbps, 34th in the world, Johor filling up with hyperscale data centres. Then September 2024: MCMC ordered every ISP to run transparent DNS proxies and hijack all queries, including those pointed at
8.8.8.8 and
1.1.1.1. Sinar Project and OONI documented it, the scandal went public, the directive was withdrawn.
The lesson the government took away was not to stop — it was to stop doing it at the network layer. The Online Safety Act 2024 plus the deeming provisions of Section 46A CMA now let the minister unilaterally declare WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook and TikTok licensed operators, whether they ever applied or not. Any platform above 8 million local users needs an ASP(C) licence, eKYC and industrial-scale moderation. The ceiling on fines went from 50,000 to 1,000,000 ringgit. Censorship has been outsourced to the platforms, and it is cheaper and much quieter that way.
Indonesia went the opposite direction and built the filter into the pipes. The Trust Positif blacklist is pushed to every ISP through RPZ. Port 53 has been forcibly redirected to filtering resolvers since 2015. A 2024 directive funnels all international traffic through a short list of licensed Tier-1/NAP nodes, so smaller providers cannot quietly decline to comply. Steam, Epic Games, PayPal and Yahoo were blocked in 2022 over a registration deadline. DuckDuckGo followed in July 2024. In autumn 2024 the government confirmed it had blocked at least 30 free VPN services, blaming online gambling. Papua's 2019 shutdown was ruled illegal by a Jakarta court in 2020, after which outages in the province began to be explained by damaged cables.
The irony is in the numbers: roughly 3,900 ASNs, 57 exchange points, up to 80% of traffic staying domestic. One of the most decentralised networks in the region, with a single centralised chokepoint bolted on top.
Both reports cover 2019–2026 — infrastructure, ASN and connectivity dynamics, IPv6, legislation, blocking practice, prosecutions, civil society, VPN usage.
https://ozi-ru.net/en/atlas.html 
