In the wake of the recent “war” between political blogs and the government, including the defamation suit against two bloggers Jeff Ooi and Ahirudin Attan (Rocky) by the New Straits Times Press (NSTP), Shaziman Abu Mansor, the Deputy Minister of Energy, Water and Communications suggested a compulsary registration of all blogs hosted locally.

The suggestion has received numerous objections from fellow bloggers. It is a waste of time and resources to register the blogs. There has been concerns that the move will result in the censorship of free-flow information on the Internet. However, the government denied that they are in a move to apply censorship, rather, they just want to collect data on who are these bloggers.

However, how many of the bloggers in Malaysia actually uses locally hosted websites? My website and blog are hosted in the United States. Many bloggers, including political ones are using foreign-hosted free blog services such as Blogger. How would the authorities able to monitor all these foreign-hosted blogs used by Malaysian bloggers?

I personally feel that the registration exercise for blogs is just a waste of effort. We Malaysians are smart to know what information are truths and what are not. It’s better for the government to spend their resources on more important tasks, such as development and reducing the cost of living, particularly urbanites.