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In an open letter from several top tech execs including Google, Yahoo and Twitter founders, Malaysia was grouped together with countries like China and Iran on internet censorship. The full text of the letter is as below:

An Open Letter to Washington

We’ve all had the good fortune to found Internet companies and nonprofits in a regulatory climate that promotes entrepreneurship, innovation, the creation of content and free expression online.

However we’re worried that the PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act — which started out as well-meaning efforts to control piracy online — will undermine that framework.

These two pieces of legislation threaten to:

• Require web services, like the ones we helped found, to monitor what users link to, or upload. This would have a chilling effect on innovation;
• Deny website owners the right to due process of law;
• Give the U.S. Government the power to censor the web using techniques similar to those used by China, Malaysia and Iran; and
• Undermine security online by changing the basic structure of the Internet.

We urge Congress to think hard before changing the regulation that underpins the Internet. Let’s not deny the next generation of entrepreneurs and founders the same opportunities that we all had.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz
Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch
David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo!
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn
Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post
Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and co-founder of Alexa Internet
Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal
Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist
Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay
Biz Stone, co-founder of Obvious and Twitter
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation
Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger and Twitter
Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo!

To add insult to injury, as many news sites picked this up (less for Malaysia and more about the big names who signed this letter), there was local Malaysian media coverage on this but they removed the reference to Malaysia.

In Malaysia’s defence, the censorship is not as bad as China and Iran with most sites still being accessible with the exception of file-sharing and porn sites but it still goes to show how the world perceives us as ‘being at the forefront’ of internet censorship.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2012 at 2:44 pm and is filed under VPN. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.