Indonesia's Ministry of Communication and Digital (Komdigi) has spent July 2026 threatening to cut off Indonesian users from some of the world's biggest hotel and airline brands — not over anything they published, but because their corporate paperwork isn't filed. On June 26, Komdigi's Directorate General of Digital Space Supervision sent notification letters to 25 private-scope Electronic System Operators (PSE) — 15 foreign, 10 domestic, covering 57 unregistered websites and apps — giving them until July 3 to register (inet.detik.com). Three complied: Strava, the AYO sports-community app, and Six Continents Hotels' Six Senses. The other 22 did not, and on July 9 Komdigi issued a final written warning with a hard deadline of July 13 — after which, the ministry said, it would proceed to "pemutusan akses" (access termination) (Liputan6).
The list reads like a directory of global hospitality: Accor (Raffles, Pullman), ANA Holdings, Qantas Airways, Qatar Airways, Banyan Tree, Barceló Hotel Group, Best Western, The Ascott Limited, WorldHotels, Archipelago International, and several Indonesian hotel groups, alongside two ed-tech platforms, Kodland and Stimuler. Director General Alexander Sabar framed the letters as a last chance, not a punishment: "Through this warning letter, we provide PSE an opportunity to fulfill registration obligations before enforcement steps are taken, including access termination" (suara.com).
The Legal Basis Is Real, and the Rationale Is Defensible
The registration requirement isn't a new or improvised power. Government Regulation 71/2019 on Electronic System and Transaction Administration requires every operator serving Indonesian users to register before going live (Article 6) (JDIH Komdigi), and the 2020 implementing rule, Permenkominfo 5/2020 on private-scope PSEs, sets out the mechanics and Komdigi's enforcement authority (official text, Wikimedia Commons).
The steelman case for this regime deserves a fair hearing. Indonesia is a market of roughly 280 million people and one of Southeast Asia's largest digital economies; a national regulator asking companies that operate there — collecting payment data, personal information, and booking records from Indonesian citizens — to register a legal presence and a point of contact is not extreme. The EU's Digital Services Act requires non-EU platforms to appoint a legal representative; India's IT Rules impose similar local-presence obligations. Registration lets a government direct consumer-protection complaints, data requests, and legal process at an entity that will actually respond, instead of a brand name with no domestic footprint. Framed narrowly, that is a legitimate, proportionate ask — and one most of these companies could satisfy with an afternoon of paperwork.
But the Enforcement Tool Doesn't Fit the Violation
The problem is what Permenkominfo 5/2020 actually asks registrants to agree to, and what Komdigi is threatening to do to enforce it. Registration under the rule obliges a PSE to take down content the government deems unlawful within 24 hours — four hours for urgent requests. That's a content-moderation bargain, built for platforms hosting user speech: social networks, marketplaces, search engines. Applying the same instrument to Accor.com or a Qatar Airways booking flow, where the "content" is a hotel room inventory and a flight schedule, stretches a speech-governance law over commercial infrastructure it was never designed to touch. A booking engine has nothing to moderate; treating its non-registration as equivalent to a social platform's non-registration collapses two very different categories of risk into one blunt remedy.
That remedy — a full domain or app block — is also disproportionate to the underlying violation, which is administrative, not a matter of harmful content actively reaching Indonesian users. Indonesia has already run this experiment. In July 2022, under the same Permenkominfo 5/2020 registration deadline, Komdigi blocked PayPal, Steam, Yahoo, Epic Games, Origin, Dota 2, and CS:GO for non-registration. The backlash was immediate — #BlokirKominfo trended on Twitter as users reported being unable to access wages and savings held in PayPal balances — and the ministry temporarily unblocked PayPal within days specifically so users could withdraw funds (Global Voices). That climbdown is itself evidence the tool was miscalibrated: a government that has to carve out an exception to prevent its own enforcement from stranding citizens' money has picked the wrong lever.
A Graduated Response Would Serve Indonesia Better
None of this means Komdigi should drop registration requirements. It means the penalty ladder needs rungs between "warning letter" and "cut off 280 million people's access to a hotel chain's website." Administrative fines, a public non-compliance registry, or throttled access to non-essential features would pressure holdouts without collateral damage to Indonesian travelers trying to book an Accor stay or check in for a Qantas flight. Indonesia's own 2022 experience shows blocking as a first-resort remedy for paperwork failures generates backlash disproportionate to the compliance gain — and a partial climbdown that undercuts the deterrent value of the threat in the first place. If the July 13 deadline passes and Komdigi actually pulls the trigger on two dozen hospitality and travel brands, expect a similar pattern: rapid public pressure, selective unblocking, and a regulator that has spent credibility on a fight better fought with fines.