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A controversial proposal aimed at monitoring Web content may have been shelved, but that has not stopped the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology from continuing to lobby for the legislation.

Minister Tifatul Sembiring said on Friday that in a draft version of the regulation, an independent team, composed of representatives from the public and civil service sectors, would have been tasked to receive complaints on Web content and process them within three days.

“And should the team have decided that the contents were disturbing, it would have ordered the Internet service provider to block them,” Tifatul said in a forum organized by the Jakarta chapter of the Alliance of Independent Journalists.

“The team would also have required the provider to order the owners of the Web site to remove the URL in question.”

Critics of the ministry’s proposal expressed relief that the government had not seriously considered looking into the Web monitoring regulation.

Pepih Nughraha, the administrator of blog site Kompasiana.com, said Internet users had the right to express their thoughts.

“They just come up with their own ethics in exchanging ideas and information on the Internet,” he said on Wednesday.

Pepih said he was glad Tifatul’s proposal never took off, even though “there have been visible attempts to impose censorship on the Web.”

Andreas Harsono, a Jakarta-based journalist and human rights activist, said “legally, the threats [to freedom of expression on the Web in Indonesia] are apparent,” citing the 2008 Information and Electronic Transaction Law and the Criminal Code, which has articles that can be used to charge people with defamation.

Andreas said one reason such laws were “unenforceable” was the resistance from media activists and civil liberties advocates.

“The laws are there, no doubt, but it remains to be seen whether they can or will ever be used to prosecute would-be offenders,” he said.

Despite the threats being posed by government-sponsored regulations, Indonesia was recently removed from the “Enemies of the Internet” list by international nongovernmental organization Reporters Without Borders.

Data from the Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association (APJII) showed that as of September 2009, there were 30 million Internet users in the country. Based on data collected by the UN International Telecommunication Union, there were 294,500 broadband Internet users in the country as of June 2009.