MCMC's deafening silence over news portal's blockage

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has still not responded to repeated queries from MalaysiaNow requesting it to shed light on a 48-hour-long denial of access suffered by the news portal on June 27.

This was despite aides to Communications and Digital Minister Fahmi Fadzil, who helms the ministry in charge of MCMC, denying any knowledge of or responsibility for the incident, which saw users of major local internet service providers (ISPs) unable to access MalaysiaNow.

Fahmi himself has ignored all questions from MalaysiaNow.

Meanwhile, his aides said the matter should be referred to MCMC and urged the portal to officially list its questions in a letter.

The requested letter was submitted the same day, on July 5.

Until today, there has been nothing but silence from MCMC, including from its strategic communication head, Shirley Tan.

Repeated messages on WhatsApp to Wan Amsyar Jailani of the corporate communications unit were also met with silence.

MCMC, the country's internet regulator, is empowered to instruct ISPs to block "undesirable" websites. In the past, such blocks were extended to news portals and websites critical of the government.

Last month's episode was the first time in many years that a news portal with official media accreditation had been blocked, after the access ban on news portal The Malaysian Insider in 2016, believed to be over its coverage of the 1MDB scandal.

The block on MalaysiaNow ended on June 29, following condemnation from opposition politicians, journalist groups and activists, many of whom urged Fahmi to come clean on the matter.

MalaysiaNow's technical team has ruled out any problem at its end.

Suspicion of an illegal attempt at blocking the portal was fuelled by the fact that global cybersecurity firm Cloudflare had ruled out any problems on its end.

A Cloudflare technician, responding to a query by MalaysiaNow, said they were "unable to replicate" the issue, adding that internal logs did not show "any specific error codes".

Besides MalaysiaNow, another website, Malaysia Today, run by prominent blogger and government critic Raja Petra Kamarudin, also appears to have been blocked from access through several local ISPs.