MDA: Views on blogs do not amount to news reporting

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[h=1]MDA: Views on blogs do not amount to news reporting[/h]
By Leonard Lim
Singapolitics
Friday, May 31, 2013

An individual publishing views on current affairs and trends on his personal website or blog does not amount to news reporting, the Media Development Authority said in a post on their Facebook page on Friday.

"The licensing framework only applies to sites that focus on reporting Singapore news and are notified by MDA that they meet the licensing criteria," the media regulator added, in the wake of concerns that bloggers may fall under a licensing framework for news sites announced on Tuesday.

The regulations are not an attempt to influence the editorial slant of news sites, the MDA added. Some in the online community have come out strongly to criticise the new ruling, and say it is a means to rein them in.

From tomorrow, news sites with significant reach and which report on Singapore regularly must be individually licensed. Currently, most websites automatically fall under a class license scheme.

The new framework makes clear that license-holders must remove content that is deemed objectionable within 24 hours, if notified to do so.

They must also post a $50,000 performance bond. Ten sites are on the list of those who have been formally notified by the MDA. They include seven run by the Singapore Press Holdings.

The MDA statement added that it would only step in when complaints are raised to their attention, and the content is assessed to be in breach of guidelines and merits action.

"Takedown requests are not common. In the past two years, MDA has only issued one take-down notice for the "Innocence of Muslims" video," it added.

 

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[h=1]News websites to require own licences[/h]By Adrian Lim
My Paper
Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Popular news websites here which regularly report on Singapore events and have a substantial reach will have to be individually licensed in order to operate, under a new framework.

The Media Development Authority (MDA) yesterday announced that the licensing will require such websites to put up a performance bond of $50,000.

This bond may be forfeited if there is a breach of licensing conditions, on a case-by-case basis.

The new licensing takes effect from Saturday.

The websites are also expected to remove content which is in breach of MDA standards within 24 hours, once directed to.

Such prohibited content may include material which offends the sensitivities of racial or religious groups, or those which are in bad taste.

Minister for Communications and Information Yaacob Ibrahim told reporters yesterday the framework ensures "parity" between online news sites, and newspapers and TV broadcasters.

Newspapers and TV broadcasters require a licence to operate.

During a visit to the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) Media Centre yesterday, Dr Yaacob said:

"We want to ensure there is a consistent regulatory framework... for both the mainstream media and online sites."

A total of 10 websites - of which seven are owned by SPH - have been assessed to meet MDA's criteria for the new licence.

The 10 websites are: straitstimes. com, asiaone.com, stomp.com.sg, omy.sg, businesstimes. sg, tnp.sg, zaobao.com as well as the sites for Today newspaper, Channel NewsAsia and Yahoo Singapore News.

Under the regulator's criteria, the websites that fall under the licensing framework are those which are visited by at least 50,000 unique Internet Protocol addresses from Singapore each month, over a period of two months.

Additionally, these websites have published an average of at least one article a week on Singapore news and current affairs over a period of two months.

The individual licences have to be renewed annually.

My Paper understands that socio- political websites such as The Online Citizen and TR Emeritus currently do not meet these criteria.

Before the new licensing, the 10 news websites were automatically class-licensed under the Broadcasting Act.

Under the Act, Internet Content Providers may be directed by MDA to remove objectionable content, using their "best efforts".

Dr Yaacob said the 24-hour compliance requirement is necessary for news websites, given how news can spread online very quickly.

He said: "Anything which can inflame religious or racial sentiments (has to be dealt with) quickly, because we don't want it to spread."

Dr Yaacob also announced that the Government plans to amend the Broadcasting Act next year. This is to ensure that websites which are hosted overseas but report on Singapore news are brought under the licensing framework as well.

It will cover websites which "transmit news to Singaporeans and with Singapore as their target (audience)", he added.

 

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[h=1]The trouble with trying to control the Internet[/h]Singapolitics
Thursday, May 30, 2013

On January 18 last year, anyone who tried to do a search on Google would have found the company's multi-coloured logo blacked out on the site. At the same time, over at Wikipedia, none of the millions of articles were accessible.

The pattern was repeated across some of the web's biggest brands. Amazon, Imgur, Flickr, Pinterest, Wordpress, Craigslist and many others had parts of all of their sites blacked out.

But this was not an attack by hackers. This was a protest.

It remains, to date, the largest coordinated online protest to have ever taken place. The sites were protesting two pieces of proposed legislation in the US: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA).

The stated purpose of the two laws were to make it harder for websites to sell or distribute pirated material.

How it intended to do that though was to empower the authorities to get a court order requiring an Internet Service Provider to take "technically feasible and reasonable measures designed to prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site". The bills would prevent sites from linking to any websites that are "dedicated to the theft of US property".

While many could agree with the desired intent of the legislation, the problem was that it effectively amounts to trying to censor the Internet. Asking an ISP to block access to a site deemed rogue felt to many like the Government exerting complete authority on the hitherto free-wheeling World Wide Web.

And while both SOPA and PIPA remain outside the law books, the battle was neither the first nor the last time Netizens and Governments would face-off over Internet regulation. Recent years have seen a push by nearly all Governments to try and rein in cyberspace.

In July that year, the Russian parliament adopted a bill that created an Internet blacklist, forcing site owners and ISPs to shut down any site that made the list. At the same time, the Parliament in UK debated a communications bill that would give the police and intelligence services the power to compel ISPs to collect and retain information about users.

Earlier this month, the US House of representatives passed a Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) which would allow security agencies to obtain information like emails and Internet browser history without first having to get a search warrant or a court subpoena.

This week, Singapore would have its own controversial Internet legislation.

On Tuesday, the Media Development Authority announced a new online licensing scheme that would apply to news websites that fulfil two criteria: If they report an average of at least one article per week on Singapore's news and current affairs over a period of two months, and have at least 50,000 unique visitors from Singapore each month over a period of two months.

The individual licences have to be renewed every year and those required to apply for a license would have to put up a performance bond of $50,000. The licence makes clear that online news sites are expected to remove content that is in breach of MDA standards within 24 hours, once notified to do so.

The new regulations are, said MDA, to ensure greater parity between the regulations that apply to the mainstream media and online media.

And while the intention is reasonable, implementation will indeed prove problematic. Despite attempts at such laws all around the world, there hasn't been one yet that properly balances sensible regulation with the Internet's organic nature.

At the heart of the issue is the seemingly limitless diversity found on the Internet.

In the MDA's case, it will not always be easy to draw a line around what it considers "news websites". It is simple enough to say that a website carrying news that is run by a news organisation should be a "news website". But what about the rest? What about aggregators, blogs, forums, social networks, online classifieds and everything in between?

A site like Propertyguru, which serves primarily as a site to sell real estate, could conceivably cross the threshold of having one news story about a Singapore a week and more than 50,000 visitors a month. Should they too be forced to get a license? If not, why not?

How will it also deal with platforms like Facebook and Twitter which do enable individuals or organisations to send regular updates about Singapore to an audience in excess of 50,000 a month.

The inability to predict every possible test-case tends to leave law-makers with the singular option of defining the laws as broadly as possible, while only choosing to enforce it on a small minority.

Because it cannot properly define all types of sites it wants to capture under Internet regulations, the Government ends up covering a whole bunch of sites it should otherwise have no interest in regulating. And that is a sure-fire way to trigger a pushback from Netizens. This was the case with SOPA, PIPA and the Russian Internet blacklist and certainly seems to apply to MDA as well.

The doomsday scenarios that many online are discussing include forcing small time operators who cannot put up $50,000 to shut down or simply blacking out sites that do not comply. It is not yet clear what would happen to sites that have their licenses revoked. Will the telcos here be asked to block them?

Ultimately, it may very well be that MDA never had any intention to use the new licensing scheme to clamp down on free expression online, but because of the nature of Internet regulation, no one can tell for sure.

And that makes the regulations troubling.