The Indonesian government has issued an ultimatum to Cloudflare to register and cooperate in the blocking of illegal gambling sites within 14 days.

At a press conference, the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization of Indonesia officially called on Cloudflare, a globally renowned Internet infrastructure provider, to work actively with the Indonesian Government to block illegal online gambling sites in Indonesia to reflect the country ‘ s firm position on combating online gambling.

Alexander Sabar, Director General of Digital Space Control in the Department, disclosed the latest findings at the launch: of the 10,000 online gambling sites sampled, up to 76 per cent relied on the services of Cloudflare. A large number of gambling sites have successfully bypassed the government blockade and repeatedly frustrated the regulatory authorities by using the Claudflare content distribution network (CDN) functionality, including the hide of IP addresses and the jump of fast domain names. Sabar stressed that it was the responsibility of Cloudflare to work more closely with the Indonesian authorities to conduct a rigorous screening of clients using its services. “Whoever is not in a position to do so, who pays for it”, he said, should not be supported by any customer who poses a risk to Indonesia. Such screening and filtering is what responsible content governance should be. At present, Cloudflare is on the list of 25 electronic system providers (PSEs) that have not yet been registered with the Indonesian authorities under Ministerial Regulation No. 5 of 2020 (on private electronic system providers). The Ministry of Communications and Digitalization has formally issued an ultimatum to Cloudflare that registration and compliance obligations will be completed within 14 working days or will face administrative penalties until service is completely terminated.

Alexander Sabar also called for the active replacement of service providers on a website currently using the Cloudflare infrastructure to avoid future disruptions due to the blockade imposed by the Government on the domain name of Cloudflare. He reiterated his country ‘ s openness to the global digital platform and services, provided that there was sufficient will to comply. In recent years, Indonesia has continuously stepped up its efforts to combat illegal online gambling by investing in advanced digital tools to identify and block illegal content. However, the widespread use of cloud infrastructure providers has greatly increased the difficulty of law enforcement, and these services provide covert and embargo-resistant access to illegal websites. Cloudflare is a company that provides protection against malicious attacks on millions of websites, with CDN (content distribution network) and multiple security features. The CDN is a web-based technology that temporarily stores web content on multiple cache servers and delivers it to end-users through optimal routes. As CDN reduces the load on the website, while increasing the speed of page loading and display of content such as images and videos, it is used by many services.

The event placed Cloudflare at the centre of a complex intersection of Internet governance, State sovereignty regulation and user privacy protection. Indonesia ‘ s initiatives highlighted the general dilemmas faced by Governments in using the global digital infrastructure to combat illegal activities within their borders, as well as the fact that in-depth cooperation in the corporate sector had become a necessary trend towards safer and more controlled cyberspace. It is worth mentioning that Cloudflare had several hours of service interruptions earlier this week, leading to errors in access from social networking sites such as X to websites such as ChatGPT and Canva. According to Cloudflare, the crash occurred after a routine change in the company ‘ s configuration, which triggered a chain reaction that eventually led to a complete disruption of the company ‘ s network and other services.