Indonesia to Develop Web Crawler to Block Online Gambling Sites

Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has announced the plans to develop a web crawler to actively seek out online gambling websites and prevent people from accessing them.

Currently, the ministry with its special team Cyber Drone 9 is operating a “web crawler” used to systematically seek out negative contents on the Internet, mainly those related to pornography and radicalism.

The government has so far never blocked websites directly, but asked Internet operators to block those contents violating the law in Indonesia.

At a meeting with lawmakers at the House of Representatives, the ministry’s Information Applications Director General Semuel Pangerapan, told them about the ministry’s plan to include online gambling under control.

“We also want (contents related to) gambling to be controlled this way,” Pangerapan said.

“We will propose its budget next year, for a stronger machine to control,” he said, adding that with the machine, the government can directly block the websites.

The ministry is proposing 1 trillion Indonesian rupiahs (US$69.5 million) for the machine in 2021.