The talk about content filtering / blocking is always a hot topic everywhere around the World. There are lots of Pros and Contras surrounding the topic. I personally against the policy, but here I will try to be neutral and examine the issues from both sides.
Internet (WWW) is indeed a double sided sword. Information are globally distributed and read. One simple "hello world" could be read by more than million people around the globe. We could post something about "how to make a bomb", or "how to kill" and the next day, the chance are high that someone out there would read our tutorial and start using it to commit murderous act, or we could start persuading people to "plant one tree per person" or "donate 1 cent per person".
The good reason for content filtering and blocking is to limit the information the society would read so that social morale degrading and state of chaos could be prevented. Even the 5 years old kid could access some porn site to learn how to have sex and to try it out tomorrow. But, as we all know "with the great power, comes a great responsibility", the authority to filter and block the content of internet is indeed a great power. Many people tend to defy their ideal of "giving the best to society" to "i block anything that i don't like and i will cover up any bad deeds i have done". So, to put it bluntly, I don't trust that any humans could maintain their morale and unbiased view when they are given such power.
We should never forget that by "having internet around" are already given us immense power. Internet users themselves should access it with a high responsibility. Actually, the best thing to do is to EDUCATE society, to raise their morale so that they would know what is RIGHT and what is WRONG. That's quite a task and many higher-ups would prefer blocking/filtering since it's much simpler and easy to do.
Up until now, country which practiced URL filtering very strictly is China, i'm not surprised, China have been restricting information flow since the Qin Dynasty. But, judging from the government's policy themselves is enough, they executed the corrupt officer without any hesitation, they execute each negative elements that could threaten political stability. that kind of punishment is enough to stop the dirty games in higher-ups. The only problem lies in avoiding casualties from common citizens, that's why china's policy is quite acceptable.
Indonesia?, well, the law itself need improvements. I often heard that "people are being jailed for a year because stealing an egg" while "corruptor are jailed 2 years for their crimes". WTF, Content filtering / blocking won't do any good if the morale of society didn't get any improvement. It's like blaming a good teacher for him to unable to teach einstein's theory of relativity to an idiots with IQ below 80. Why bother with unimportant tasks like fighting software piracy, UU-ITE, etc. While statistically most of the crime were commited by the people who don't have an internet access (kakek-kakek memperkosa anak balita, dll). Despite the appearance, crimes involving WWW in indonesia are often actually of small impact to the society.
For Indonesia at this moment, aggressive campaign to promote personal internet filtering (for parents) and improving citizens morale would do good, since, blocking / filtering contents could give negative impacts on society (raise riots, protests, etc) besides, such method would be broken by society's curious and immoral minds.
