Best VPNs for Indonesia

Indonesia is home to a vast cultural diversity within its borders and thus hosts many local websites and online services. This alone makes it worth connecting to the country. Yogyakarta is a very important artistic and cultural city that can equally provide a lot of information if you happen to be curious about Indonesia. Connection speeds however, are not the best. Furthermore, considering that if you use a VPN to connect to or from Indonesia, your connection speeds are a tad slower in general since encryptions need some resources. Despite the large number of users, Indonesia still lacks quality internet. Still, support for mobile devices is better. This is understandable, as nearly half of all internet connections in the country are made from such machines.

The majority of internet users in Indonesia are below the age of 30. The government – consequently or not – treats content that these age groups most often view with increased attention. For example, social media sites are very popular among Indonesians. Therefore, more desperate measures are made against exposing sensitive private information and preventive measures are employed against discriminating people online. All forms of censorship and online restrictions are regulated by law; the Law on Information and Electric Transactions (2008) is a good example of this.

Censorship happens often in Indonesia. The main areas hit by such government activity are pornography (religion might be a factor here) and defamation. In fact, if you behave in a defamatory way on the Indonesian internet, you are potentially the subject of fines, with their dollars well into the five or six digit domains. Gambling isn’t allowed on the Indonesian internet either. Copyright infringement is also a question circulating around nowadays – Indonesia is not the best country for P2P and torrenting. However, it must be noted that not all ISPs operate the same way. Indonesia’s Internet Service Providers differ tremendously, resulting in a censored, but still mildly chaotic internet, as far as content availability goes. Nudity is often censored; foreign websites that might include bare skin, even for artistic purposes, have fallen victim to this policy. Reddit or Vimeo cannot be found in Indonesia by regular means. If you use a VPN however, you can actually access these sites via connecting to the internet with another country’s IP address (where the domains are allowed), or by using SmartDNS.

Indonesia has mixed streaming availability. Spotify cannot be found here (but will be in the near future), nor can you enjoy music on Google Play (just like India, Indonesia and Google do not have the best relations). Apple Music is available though, and so are 8tracks and Guevra. In general, radio based music coverage is more widespread in the country than specific platform based audio distribution (such as SoundCloud or Bandcamp, both of which are available and popular). There is a local free music streamer in Indonesia, Ohdio. For film and moving pictures, your options are not that good. Netflix is not good to go in the country, and in the summer of 2015, 22 such websites – official and unofficial – were blocked. A free one, PopcornTime, is still available, though.