Global Electronic System Providers are expected to have offices in Indonesia to facilitate oversight

Jakarta (ANTARA) – The government is urging global Electronic System Providers (PSEs) with large numbers of users in Indonesia to establish representative offices in Indonesia so that authorities can supervise them more easily.

Senior Policy Analyst at the Directorate General for Digital Space Oversight, Ministry of Communications and Digital, Nanci Laura Sitinjak, said that supervising cross-border PSEs is not easy. ‘We recognise that cross-border supervision is complex, intricate, and not straightforward. Therefore we hope that if they have a presence in Indonesia we can supervise them in the same way we do for local companies,’ she said at the Bisnis Indonesia Forum, attended from Jakarta on Wednesday.

According to her, efforts to find solutions when there are operational problems could be easier if global PSEs have representative offices in Indonesia. ‘Where cross-border there are jurisdictional limits, there are limits between countries, and these can make it difficult when we ask them to disclose electronic information,’ she said. ‘One platform we are continually pushing is Roblox. We keep asking them to open a representative office in Indonesia,’ Nanci added, noting that the gaming platform has tens of millions of users in Indonesia.

According to Roblox’s data, there are 45 million accounts on the platform based in Indonesia, with 23 million of them being accounts for players under the age of 16.

Minister of Communications and Digital Meutya Hafid, during a working meeting with the DPR’s Commission I on Monday (18 May), said there is a need for global PSEs to have representative offices in Indonesia. ‘We are also considering increasing this obligation so that platforms can communicate with the government more rapidly, particularly when there are issues that require attention, so that they have offices in the country,’ she said.

The presence of global PSE offices in the country will facilitate the enforcement of oversight and efforts to deliver solutions to protect Indonesian platform users from exposure to negative content such as hoaxes, scams, and pornography.