Indonesia bans popular gif download website

Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (Kemkominfo) appears to have over-reached in its war against online gambling, imposing an ISP-block on Giphy.com, one of the web’s most reputable and large repositories of fun gifs.

Instead of blocking the actual gambling sites, the ministry has gone after a popular non-gambling company that merely carries online gambling advertisements on its pages, perhaps an illustration of what can go wrong when bureaucracy is given this sort of indiscriminate blocking power.

Giphy joins a long list of banned sites which the Indonesian ministry has previously ordered blocked on questionable reasoning, including Reddit and Vimeo.

Approached for comment by reporters, a ministry spokesman said that the block had been imposed following a complaint from a member of the Indonesian public.

“If we click the ads, we will be directed to the gambling site,” the spokesman explained, raising the legitimate question of whether government officials have authority to arbitrarily impose blocks on websites that merely carry adverts and are not directly involved in activities that the government feels are unacceptable – presumably without proper investigation or recourse to law?

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