Twitter opens Indonesia representative office tomorrow, might soon be asked to incorporate

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo visits Indonesia tomorrow for the first time. The purpose of his visit is to inaugurate Twitter’s representative office in Indonesia, which is headed up by Rick Mulia. Costolo will likely also meet with Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo and minister of communications and information technology, Rudiantara.

Costolo’s visit comes during a time of mixed messages from Indonesia, as the nation struggles to find a clear position on how it wants to treat massive online content networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

On one side, Indonesia seeks partnerships with these companies to solve some of its pressing issues. Petajakarta, for instance, is a collaboration between Twitter and Jakarta’s Provincial Government. It aggregates and analyzes citizens’ tweets about floodings and other hazards. According to local media portal Detik, Indonesia’s tech minister Rudiantara says a key point on the agenda when meeting with Costolo will be to discuss further possible partnerships with Twitter on early-warning systems.

The private sector, too, has joined in partnerships of this kind. In 2014, Indonesian telco XL Axiata teamed up with Facebook for their internet.org program. The purpose of this collaboration was to learn about how to analyze and improve network performance on mobile phones. Some mobile phone carriers, both state-affiliated and private, have been partnering with Facebook for years to offer free or discounted data for Faceook messaging.

The statement that Indonesian users love social networks like Twitter and Facebook has been proven many times over, with high adoption rates and active usage of the networks. Indonesia ranks 4th globally in terms of Facebook users.

On the other side, there are increasing protectionist tendencies within the government and civil society, seeking to curb the growth of foreign online giants in Indonesia for the sake of national interests. A parliamentary session on this subject earlier this week surfaced some of these far-reaching ideas.

According to local newspaper Koran Sindo, Mahfudz Siddiq, chairman of Commision I of the Indonesian parliament, said that global online content companies would harm Indonesia because of high transaction values which are not subject to tax.

Koran Sindo says that the demands voiced during the parliamentary session included that these companies should be required to open a legal entity in Indonesia, so that they could not avoid paying taxes. Another proposal went even further, requesting these companies to place servers in Indonesia so that they would be accessible to the state’s censorship practices.

Teguh Prasetya, chairman of the Indonesian ICT Experts Forum, chimed in on the debate today in local media. According to Okezone, Prasetya said that a threat from Indonesia to close foreign websites who refuse to build up a legal entity in Indonesia would be a good idea. “Indonesia can go on without these large foreign websites,” said Prasetya. “Just look, when Vimeo was closed, this had no effect on us at all.”

Prasetya’s statements later resulted in a fierce exchange of opinions with Indonesian tech journalist Aulia Masna on Twitter.

@teguhprasetya there are no benefits from a protectionist mindset in an open society with international ecosystem. Indonesia is not China.

— Aulia Masna (@amasna) March 25, 2015