Indonesia's Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs (Komdigi) confirmed on August 15-16, 2026 that it had formally asked Apple and Google to delist Hornet, a dating and social app used by gay, bi, trans, and queer men, from their Indonesian storefronts. Alexander Sabar, Komdigi's Director General of Digital Space Supervision, said the ministry had "asked App Store and Play Store to immediately delist" the app (Antara News). The official trigger, according to Komdigi's own account, was twofold: public complaints that Hornet's community features amounted to an LGBTIQ+ "campaign" inconsistent with Indonesian norms, and the fact that Hornet had never registered as a Penyelenggara Sistem Elektronik (PSE) — an Electronic System Operator — under Indonesian law (InfoPublik).
The Steelman: A Registration Regime Isn't Inherently Unreasonable
Before treating this as pure pretext, it's worth taking Komdigi's stated legal theory seriously. Government Regulation 71/2019 on Electronic Systems and Transactions requires any private-scope PSE offering communication, content, or transaction services to Indonesian users to register through the risk-based licensing system, and gives the government power to order access termination for non-compliant operators (PP 71/2019, JDIH Komdigi). Permenkominfo 10/2021 fixed the registration deadline at six months after the OSS licensing system went live (Permenkominfo 10/2021, JDIH Komdigi). A country of 280 million internet users has a legitimate interest in knowing who operates platforms serving its market, in having a legal point of contact for law enforcement and data requests, and in enforcing that requirement evenly rather than letting some foreign apps route around it indefinitely. Registration regimes of this kind exist, in some form, in the EU, UK, and India too.
The problem is not that Indonesia has a PSE registry. It's how selectively and how expansively that registry gets invoked.
The Pattern: Registration Enforcement Tracks Content, Not Compliance
Komdigi's own enforcement record undercuts the neutral-registration framing. Nine months before the Hornet order, on November 17, 2025, the same directorate sent warning letters to 25 unregistered private PSE operators — including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Wikipedia, Duolingo, Cloudflare, and Dropbox — threatening "administrative sanctions up to service access termination" under Permenkominfo 5/2020 (Komdigi press release, Nov. 2025; Antara News). None of those platforms were delisted within days of the notice. Hornet was singled out for an immediate app-store delisting order — not a warning letter, not a registration deadline, but a direct request to Apple and Google — the same week public complaints about its LGBTIQ+ content surfaced. Sabar's own statement to Antara named the content complaint before the registration gap (Antara News).
This is not a new pattern for Komdigi's predecessor ministry. Between 2016 and 2018, the Ministry of Communication and Information blocked 169 websites carrying what it called "immoral" LGBT content, alongside the dating apps Grindr and Blued, ultimately pressuring Google to pull Blued from the Play Store entirely in January 2018 (Global Press Journal). The legal hooks varied — pornography law, decency provisions in the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, broadcasting rules — but the target category was consistent. PSE non-registration is simply the newest hook, and a convenient one: it lets Komdigi frame a content-driven removal as routine regulatory housekeeping rather than viewpoint-based censorship.
Why the Distinction Matters for Platform Governance
A registration requirement enforced case-by-case, correlated with a platform's subject matter rather than its compliance status, stops being a neutral rule of the road and becomes a discretionary content lever with a paperwork alibi. That matters beyond LGBTQ+ Indonesians who lose a communication tool, though that harm is real and immediate for a population already facing criminalization risk in several Indonesian jurisdictions with Sharia-influenced bylaws. It also matters for every foreign platform weighing whether to operate in Indonesia at all: if registration compliance is enforced unevenly and can be accelerated by a content complaint, the rule stops functioning as a predictable compliance obligation and starts functioning as leverage.
Apple and Google are now in an uncomfortable position. Neither company has publicly confirmed compliance with Komdigi's request as of this writing, and neither faces a court order — only a ministry letter. Complying sets a precedent that a regulator's content complaint, laundered through a generic registration technicality, is sufficient to pull an app for 280 million users. Refusing risks the platform-level access consequences PP 71/2019 authorizes.
The Proportionate Path Komdigi Skipped
Nothing here argues Indonesia lacks authority to require PSE registration or to enforce it. It argues that enforcement claiming neutrality should look neutral: a registration deadline, a warning period matching the one given to ChatGPT and Wikipedia, and a public compliance timeline — not an immediate delisting order in the same breath as a content complaint. Indonesia's own recent practice, cutting off unregistered PSE only after they showed no real commitment to compliance over months, shows Komdigi knows how to do graduated enforcement when it wants to. It chose not to here. That choice, more than the underlying statute, is what deserves scrutiny.