WSJ.com - Singapore and the Internet

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Singapore and the Internet
May 10, 2005

Singaporean officials are not known to take criticism lightly, and have successfully won libel suits against media critics in local courts. But while the print media may be resigned to the ever-looming threat of legal repercussions, Singaporean bloggers who record their thoughts in online Web diaries may have thought they were not subject to the same rules. This may not be the case much longer, however.

A threatened libel suit against a blogger by a Singapore government agency is now raising the question of whether the blogging is subject to the same rules as the other media. Singapore's science and technology agency A*Star, which draws on taxpayers' money to offer scholarships, threatened a blogger with legal action after he criticized the agency's scholarship system. Chen Jiahao, a former government scholarship student now studying in the United States, has shut down his blog and apologized unreservedly.

The pressing issue here is not whether or not of Mr. Chen's remarks were indeed defamatory as the agency contends. The larger issue is what role the Internet will play in Singapore. Cherian George, an academic at the communications school at Nanyang Technological University, tells us that in Singapore, the Internet has been significantly freer than newspapers, because the government has decided to treat most of the Internet as private communication.

Still, this freedom has its limits, as political and religious Web sites, for example, need to register. Mr. George says that while it is too soon to say what this A*Star case portends, it raises the important question of whether Singapore's Internet regulations will be adjusted in order to cover blogs as well as Web sites. "It is a landmark case," Mr. George tells us. "It does bring blogging into the public sphere, so to speak."

Reporters Without Borders, a media-freedom organization that expressed support for Mr. Chen, says that "Threatening a libel suit is an effective way to silence criticism and this case highlights the lack of free expression in Singapore, which is among the 20 lowest-scoring countries in our worldwide press freedom index."

To be sure, Singapore, like China, understands the enormous business opportunity afforded by giving its citizens Internet access. And thankfully, the Singaporean government doesn't even come close to Beijing's draconian attempts to block and censor Internet content. Still, Singapore has less obvious, yet still effective ways to rein in the media. The threat of libel is very effective for cowing media critics, especially in a society where or the "out of bounds" markers are often unclear.

A freer flow of ideas and more open debate is however essential for Singapore to remain competitive in today's economy, and more private spaces for free expression -- like blogging-could be a positive trend. It is too soon to tell if this recent incident will portend a more restrictive environment for bloggers who write about Singapore. But after hearing about cases like Mr. Chen's, they might start being a lot more constrained.

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