Five reasons to change our Internet laws

Communications technology and cybercrime have progressed well beyond the law

FMT LETTERS

By A.J. Surin

When the Malaysian Parliament started passing Malaysia’s cyberlaws commencing from 1997 the internet was in its nascent stage. People started talking about the converging industries of communications, computing and content. Interested businessmen were proposing and creating portals, internet service providers, websites and dial-up connections.

Parliament passed these cyber laws to facilitate and, somehow, to regulate these converging technologies. Two decades later, with changes in technology, there can be no better time to amend or review Malaysia’s cyber laws, even to look at a complete overhaul or rejuvenation.

1. Technology and its business models have, as can be predicted, left the law far behind. No one is to be blamed nor criticised, because from my experience, the law always seems to play catch-up with business and human activity all the time. What more with technology which normally pushes boundaries of how humans manipulate data, entertain themselves as well as to increase efficiencies in their daily lives.

2. The Communications and Multimedia Act as well as the Communications and Multimedia Commission Act must be rejuvenated because there is a pressing need to separate the roles of the Chairman and the Chief Executive Officer of the commission. The present provisions of the Acts do not envision the role of a chief executive. However, because MCMC is a regulator, there is a need to decouple the two roles so that there is transparency; accountability will undoubtedly be enhanced. Thereafter, no one critic can say that there is hanky-panky going on – the roles will act as a check and balance to each other.

3. The current provisions of the Communications and Multimedia Act lean heavily toward the growth, facilitation and regulation of hard infrastructure as well as the spectrum related to communications. The laws need to be rejuvenated to enhance creativity, content as well as innovation, the soft infrastructure of communication. I believe that the rejuvenation of the laws will not lead to the regulation of content but more of an enhancement of the industries related to content development.

4. The coming of the Internet of Things, essentially all equipment and gadgets, from smartphones, webcams and computer to cars, refrigerators and medical devices, connected to the internet to make them and our lives more efficient and to serve us better.

Because of the fact that they are connected to or via a rather open platform, all this equipment is vulnerable to cyber attack. This is a security issue – if your PC gets hacked, it is a nuisance. But if your car, pacemaker or computerised insulin pump gets hacked, it may be deadly. Former US Vice President Dick Cheney wears a pacemaker with wireless control disconnected so that hackers can’t remotely stop it.

The government needs to reconsider and rejuvenate the two laws as well as the Computer Crimes Act to determine whether or not the laws are adequate to handle these types of cyber attacks.

5. To clearly define telecommunications companies’ duties on speed, quality and affordability. Affordability is important to not only increase the competitiveness of the nation but also to provide opportunities to low-income earners to improve themselves and their academic and economic lives through the use of broadband.

Malaysia should move towards being a fully developed nation by looking at hard and soft infrastructure as a right, and not a privilege.

One more note that needs to be addressed: not even the cleverest legal and technical minds can foresee all the issues or practical situations that technology and its advance can throw up. It is imperative that the government act decisively to rejuvenate laws related to the internet and technology.

We cannot afford to have a Bill being discussed and then put on the back burner simply because stakeholders cannot foresee what specific technologies will come out the winners and what issues they will throw up at the turn of the corner.

The idea is to organise a great group of technological and legal professionals who are hardwired to “feel” or intuit the future of technological trends and patterns, as opposed to the future of specific technologies and to allow them the space to at least perform the preliminary research to enable the drafting of the law.

By doing so, Malaysia will again be way ahead of the policies and laws of most countries, including advanced nations.

A.J. Surin deals with communications law