A person holds up a mobile phone showing advertisements for online gambling platforms on June 19, 2024 in Jakarta. - Photo: Antara
JAKARTA: The government is planning to impose a daily transfer limit on mobile phone credits and ban access to free virtual private network (VPN) services in its bid to combat unchecked online gambling.
Communications and Information Minister Budi Arie Setiadi said a number of payment methods, including banking transactions, e-wallet and phone credit transfers enabled online gambling.
The ministry had uncovered suspiciously large amounts of daily phone credit transfers thought to be linked to gambling transactions, leading to its decision.
“The communications ministry has decided to cap phone credit transfers to Rp 1 million [US$61] per day.
"If it is more than that, we have reasons to suspect that phone users [making large transfers] are involved in online gambling,” the minister told a press briefing on Thursday (Aug 1).
“It doesn’t make sense. Who would need Rp 100 million, Rp 2 billion for daily calls?” he added.
The government has vowed to crack down on online gambling in recent months and has banned access to several such websites.
Though illegal, official data showed that 3 million Indonesians gambled online last year and spent an estimated $20 billion, or around 1.5 percent of Indonesia’s GDP.
In the past year, the ministry has banned access to more than 2.7 million websites linked to online gambling.
It has also blocked 6,199 bank accounts, 570 e-wallet accounts, more than 24,000 online gambling ads on government websites and another 23,000 ads on the websites of educational institutions.
It has also worked with Google and Meta to block more than 24,000 keywords on platforms suspected of leading to online gambling sites.
The ministry said it also planned to limit access to free VPN services in the country to prevent people accessing blocked internet content.
Among the banned websites is United States-based privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo, with the ministry citing concerns it could be used to access pornography and online gambling websites, both of which are illegal.
Usman Kansong, the ministry’s information and public communication director general, told Reuters on Friday that DuckDuckGo had been blocked "because of the many complaints made to us about the rampant online gambling and pornography content in its search results".
Social media platform Reddit and video hosting platform Vimeo are also blocked in the world's largest Muslim-majority country, which has strict rules banning the online sharing of content deemed obscene.
Privately owned DuckDuckGo did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment outside normal US business hours, but the company said on its website that it offered several products intended to "help people protect their online privacy" including its search engine, which it said had been praised by privacy advocates.
The ministry did not say how DuckDuckGo differed from other search engines, such as Google. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
