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Malaysia Mulls Compulsory Registration of Tech Workers

Posted by timothy on from the governments-generally-suck dept.

Viceice writes "Hot on the heels of recently passed legislation further restricting Freedom of Assembly, the National Front-led Malaysian Government is now working to make the registration of all tech workers mandatory, making it an offence punishable by a stiff fine and jail for anyone to plan, deploy, service and maintain any computing system without a license. A leaked draft of the legislation has ignited a backlash among the IT community, which fear the law, when passed, will be devastating to the tech industry in Malaysia."

4 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. All for the sake of censorship. by unity100 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Malaysia had had passed on to an islamist party government. and they have been trying to increasingly implement sharia-compliant measures. internet irritates them to no end with its freedom and possibility of pursuing anything 'non islamic'.

    this is simply another measure - if you make all i.t. workers registered, noone can set up stuff that may prevent/circumvent censorship or anything and still remain in business. this includes proxies, servers, networks - anything. basically its just a control scheme.

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    Read radical news here
    1. Re:All for the sake of censorship. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Not just censorship. Mandatory legal licensing is a proven method of protectionism that restricts labor movement between states, grants special privilege to a select few, and offers more justification for bureaucracy. It is just one more tool of the labor monopolists.

      It is fortunate that IT is too new a field to have yet become infused with these sorts of restraints. It provides a nice means to compare the vast assortment of innovation and falling prices to other more locked down labor sectors, like medicine and law.

  2. Malaysia also has institutionalized racism by circletimessquare · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_racism#Malaysian_institutional_racism

    its the reason Singapore exists (a Chinese dominated enclave that was not exactly going to submit to the concept)

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    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  3. stifle innovation? really? ya think? by wierd_w · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I mean, really. What do these people think it will do, besides *restrict* technological innovation? That is defact the point with this kind of legislation.

    In the case of licensing doctors, it is to *restrict* people with dodgy credentials performing surgeries, or proscribing medications. Ideally, this is to protect patients, as it helps regulate a standard QoS in that industry. Same with legal professionals. Likewise, that restriction reduces the number of people performing those services. This has two immediate effects: 1) it reduces supply for that service, increasing costs. 2)it reduces the number of people doing that work, naturally reducing the number of minds that would bring innovative ideas to those service industries.

    The whole reason why the internet exploded with applications (both computational, and user service oriented) and service providers was *because* of that lack of regulation. The emergence of top players comes about as genuine success stories in an unregulated/minimally regulated system. If providers were abusive, people stopped using them, and other providers gobbled them up. The reason for this explosion of innovation was because literally *anyone* with an internet connection and some intelligence could contribute to, or create a new idea, and promote it. This is how free software thrives. Anyone with an internet connection can download a code repository, read it, and suggest improvements. It doesn't matter if you are a millionaire payboy, or an ammonia scented cleaning woman, if your suggested changes are sound, you have improved the collective work, and everyone benefits from your innovative idea.

    Instigating this kind of licensing would block out the vast majority of users from legally engaging in this process. As such, their ideas, even if perfectly valid, and even game changing, are withheld from inclusion, because "they aren't licensed."

    This applies to every level of internet culture and its distributed source of innovation. It is poison to the very infrastructure they want to control.

    The addage "don't ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to ignorance." Is stretched very thin here. How can you create such legislation, knowing what the internet is, and NOT see how it is antithetically counter opposed to the very foundational source of that system's recourcefulness and robustness in terms of innovation?

    Stifle innovation? Really? Ya think?