Malaysia Digital Free Trade Zone(mydftz.com) |
Malaysia Digital Free Trade Zone(mydftz.com) |
https://www.google.com/search?q=malaysia+internet+sharia+law...
In my opinion it's ethically the same as deciding to operate a datacenter in mainland China and sign up for all the government laws, regulations and oversight that goes with it: You can do it from a technical perspective, but many US based companies have explicitly chosen not to do so based on their own ethical standards.
I also don't think the comparison to mainland China is warranted. Mainland China is far worse when it comes to censorship and to tightly controlling anyone hosting data on servers in China. I used to have a company in China and for example if you host user submitted data that are publicly viewable you had to have a system in place to censor anything critical of the government. And, if I remember correctly since I left, companies are required to get and validate a user's phone number when registering to be able to track any user identity if requested. This is way worse than Malaysia.
Even in term of blocking, Malaysia only ever blocks by blocking a the DNS level (same as most European countries), they don't have anything equivalent to the great firewall and they don't prevent users from using DNS servers outside of Malaysia.
Malaysia is definitely not a perfect country, the government is corrupted and in a truly democratic country Najib would not have kept power nor would Anwar have been sent to prison but it's much more free and much closer to a democracy than China.
The important disclaimer to such statement is "For Now". There's guarantee that will not change in the future.
I wouldn't store any confidential/secure data in a country that you can bribe cops for relatively trivial sums in. That does end up writing off most of the world for storage, admittedly.
I'm Malaysian and I'm wondering what the perception is for an international user if a SaaS business is known to be from Malaysia.
For the record, bigwig companies like Grab had its roots in Malaysia. Only when they started getting big they moved to Singapore, perhaps due to such perception issues, and also talent.
Anyway, I've lived and grown up in Malaysia, and all I can say is that while the system ain't perfect, but daily life goes on with normalcy and I'm not so sure about the FUD portayed in comments.
The UK at least pays lip service to being a secular society. Where it gets scary to me is politicians in religious countries actively implementing sharia law in relations to internet/telecom to appease a fundamentalist base.
I agree that the UK is going a very worrying direction, forcing retail ISPs to operate a "porn filter" and have it enabled by default, and so forth.
Realistically: Maybe in part. It looks like in part they are trying to challenge Singapore for air freight logistics. Unfortunately KLIA is miles from KL and nobody really lives out there, so even though you get "express freight handling" the only major nearby markets accessible by road are Singapore and KL (plus some second-tier peninsular Malaysian cities) and in the former case you have to pay to cross another border.
Amusingly: On their promotional video they tout the future as being "borderless" - quite funny as KL is known to be a global center for forged, modified and stolen passports and other identity documentation.
So, globalization is a 'mixed bag.'
I really don't understand why this kind of thing can't be done over a video conference, and then printed, stamped, scanned, emailed, printed locally. But, I got a nice little trip to my hometown out of it, so whatever.