[walrus01]

You only need to google "Malaysia internet sharia law" to understand why it would be a very poor idea to invest in datacenter/telecom infrastructure in Malaysia, domestically. The government is going the same direction as Turkey recently.

https://www.google.com/search?q=malaysia+internet+sharia+law...

In my opinion it's ethically the same as deciding to operate a datacenter in mainland China and sign up for all the government laws, regulations and oversight that goes with it: You can do it from a technical perspective, but many US based companies have explicitly chosen not to do so based on their own ethical standards.

[nicolas_t]

Malaysia has a dual legal system so any sharia law there doesn't apply to non-muslim (40% of the population).

I also don't think the comparison to mainland China is warranted. Mainland China is far worse when it comes to censorship and to tightly controlling anyone hosting data on servers in China. I used to have a company in China and for example if you host user submitted data that are publicly viewable you had to have a system in place to censor anything critical of the government. And, if I remember correctly since I left, companies are required to get and validate a user's phone number when registering to be able to track any user identity if requested. This is way worse than Malaysia.

Even in term of blocking, Malaysia only ever blocks by blocking a the DNS level (same as most European countries), they don't have anything equivalent to the great firewall and they don't prevent users from using DNS servers outside of Malaysia.

Malaysia is definitely not a perfect country, the government is corrupted and in a truly democratic country Najib would not have kept power nor would Anwar have been sent to prison but it's much more free and much closer to a democracy than China.

[wilhow]

"Malaysia has a dual legal system so any sharia law there doesn't apply to non-muslim."

The important disclaimer to such statement is "For Now". There's guarantee that will not change in the future.

[nicolas_t]

With 40% of the population being non muslim and the huge discontent changing that would cause, I think it's extremely unlikely that it would change. Even PAS isn't advocating for sharia bills to apply to non-muslims.

[toomanybeersies]

It's not even just the government.

I wouldn't store any confidential/secure data in a country that you can bribe cops for relatively trivial sums in. That does end up writing off most of the world for storage, admittedly.

[ernsheong]

Most startups in Malaysia use services like S3 storage and host their databases elsewhere, which are not based in Malaysia (usually Singapore, Japan, US, etc.) At my first startup job my boss insisted to never store any data in Malaysia because he was kinda paranoid. If a Malaysian startup does that is it still a concern for international users?

I'm Malaysian and I'm wondering what the perception is for an international user if a SaaS business is known to be from Malaysia.

For the record, bigwig companies like Grab had its roots in Malaysia. Only when they started getting big they moved to Singapore, perhaps due to such perception issues, and also talent.

Anyway, I've lived and grown up in Malaysia, and all I can say is that while the system ain't perfect, but daily life goes on with normalcy and I'm not so sure about the FUD portayed in comments.

[walrus01]

Yeah there is a huge difference. If you have a datacenter in Grant County, WA, attempting to bribe the police will only result in them arresting you and calling the feds.

[contingencies]

I agree about Malaysia: it is extremely corrupt and abuses of power are the norm rather than the exception. That said, US and UK government interventionism and surveillance is really not that different to China. The UK is actually worse in many ways. For example, the UK is reported to record all internet traffic and have the most concurrent media gag orders in operation of any nation.

[walrus01]

The UK is at this point far worse than the US. At least in the US you can publish very nearly anything on your own servers, fully self hosted, and not get it taken down unless it is explicitly making terroristic threats or hosting child porn. There's a huge amount of first amendment precedent set for parody, satire and generally offensive things (Hustler Magazine parodying Jerry Falwell, for example) that meets the criteria for being protected by the first amendment.

The UK at least pays lip service to being a secular society. Where it gets scary to me is politicians in religious countries actively implementing sharia law in relations to internet/telecom to appease a fundamentalist base.

I agree that the UK is going a very worrying direction, forcing retail ISPs to operate a "porn filter" and have it enabled by default, and so forth.

[faizmokhtar]

This is the first time I heard about "Malaysia internet sharia law". Does it mean the law being applied to internet usage?