MDA: Bloggers need not apply for licence

MDA has clarified that individual bloggers need not have to apply for licence under the new regulation. This is no cold comfort as things may change along the way. This controversial move to regulate something that is virtual and unlikely to be feasible without playing rough is still a mystery to many, and keeps everyone wondering why it is found so necessary to do so.

When a blogger puts up a post in cyberspace, it is just that, a post in cyberspace. Where is this cyberspace? It is in a way a void that you cannot see or touch, just like a memory in a human brain, there but not there. And the blogger making a post can be sitting here, in London, New York, Beijing or Tokyo, and he does not specify that his post is to go to Sin City or whatever place. Once in cyberspace, it is out there but not there at the same time. Only those who want to view them will see them, with a conscious effort of going to the url. Without making this effort, the post is transparent to anyone and virtually not there, non existence.

How can information (slander or personal attack etc aside) in cyberspace come under anyone or any country’s jurisdiction? And in a way, messing up someone’s blog in cyberspace is an intrusion into someone’s private space even if it has no privacy restriction. Why should anyone be given the right to go out there to block someone’s url because he does not like what the other person is writing? Put it in another way, can anyone go into a person’s diary to do as he pleases? Or can anyone, including govt, think it is ok, it has the right, to mess around with an individual’s diary or blog?

Every individual should have his right to write as he pleases in his own diary or blog, as long as he does not venture into areas of libel and scandal or posting offending comments to violate others or incite violence against anyone. Tiok boh? And there is no law to say he cannot leave his diary or blog about for people to assess them at their own free will.

The whole thing about licensing and regulating blogs is crazy and vain, and only control freaks or people with an obsessive fear of being exposed of their freakish acts or wrongdoings would be so perturbed by it. If one has nothing to hide, why is there so much fear, so much obsession, to want to control people speaking their minds? The doer has all the freedom to do as he pleases, and the commentator must also has all his freedom to have his views, contrary or conflicting views. Cannot meh? Any part that violates whatever safeguards to an individual’s right is all there in the legal provisions of the state.

We are just having a peep into this paranoid thinking process, that being in the govt, one is given the god forsaken right to do what one pleases, even in interfering with the free flow of information and speech, in what people can see, read, hear, write or say. And even the audacity to set standards in civility or language or way of writings. KNN, I want to write in whatever way or style or broken English, what has that got to do with the Govt?  Boh song huh? This is indeed a funny circus.