Malaysia Mulls Compulsory Registration of Tech Workers 187
Viceice writes "Hot on the heels of recently passed legislation further restricting Freedom of Assembly, the National Front-led Malaysian Government is now working to make the registration of all tech workers mandatory, making it an offence punishable by a stiff fine and jail for anyone to plan, deploy, service and maintain any computing system without a license. A leaked draft of the legislation has ignited a backlash among the IT community, which fear the law, when passed, will be devastating to the tech industry in Malaysia."
One step away from IT Unions (Score:1, Insightful)
Whats wrong with requiring tech people to be licenced, we require it of doctors, lawyers, teachers, police need a warrant ..so why not IT tech workers.
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Re:All for the sake of censorship. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just censorship. Mandatory legal licensing is a proven method of protectionism that restricts labor movement between states, grants special privilege to a select few, and offers more justification for bureaucracy. It is just one more tool of the labor monopolists.
It is fortunate that IT is too new a field to have yet become infused with these sorts of restraints. It provides a nice means to compare the vast assortment of innovation and falling prices to other more locked down labor sectors, like medicine and law.
Re:Licensing (Score:4, Insightful)
Many trades require licensing IF the person involved is going to offer their services to the general public.
Licensing provisions do not apply anywhere as often if the person is going to practice the trade as an employee.
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A typical Malaysian problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The country has a diverse population with a Muslim majority and economical strong Indian and especially Chinese minorities. The last two make this a quite well off country.
Historically this mix has been tightly controlled by an undemocratic government, this government knows the economy would seriously suffer when they would let slip the present (enforced) balance of power between these groups.
It's no surprise the present government tries to continue this control and protect the relative strong economy by among others regulating new means of communication like computers and especially the internet.
Re:All for the sake of censorship. (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, every time I tell people this on /. I'm the on that gets called a bigot and a racist. Glad to see that people are finally waking up to the reality of what Malaysia is like. Maybe they'll wake up that Egypt is now full steaming ahead to the same fate.
stifle innovation? really? ya think? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, really. What do these people think it will do, besides *restrict* technological innovation? That is defact the point with this kind of legislation.
In the case of licensing doctors, it is to *restrict* people with dodgy credentials performing surgeries, or proscribing medications. Ideally, this is to protect patients, as it helps regulate a standard QoS in that industry. Same with legal professionals. Likewise, that restriction reduces the number of people performing those services. This has two immediate effects: 1) it reduces supply for that service, increasing costs. 2)it reduces the number of people doing that work, naturally reducing the number of minds that would bring innovative ideas to those service industries.
The whole reason why the internet exploded with applications (both computational, and user service oriented) and service providers was *because* of that lack of regulation. The emergence of top players comes about as genuine success stories in an unregulated/minimally regulated system. If providers were abusive, people stopped using them, and other providers gobbled them up. The reason for this explosion of innovation was because literally *anyone* with an internet connection and some intelligence could contribute to, or create a new idea, and promote it. This is how free software thrives. Anyone with an internet connection can download a code repository, read it, and suggest improvements. It doesn't matter if you are a millionaire payboy, or an ammonia scented cleaning woman, if your suggested changes are sound, you have improved the collective work, and everyone benefits from your innovative idea.
Instigating this kind of licensing would block out the vast majority of users from legally engaging in this process. As such, their ideas, even if perfectly valid, and even game changing, are withheld from inclusion, because "they aren't licensed."
This applies to every level of internet culture and its distributed source of innovation. It is poison to the very infrastructure they want to control.
The addage "don't ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to ignorance." Is stretched very thin here. How can you create such legislation, knowing what the internet is, and NOT see how it is antithetically counter opposed to the very foundational source of that system's recourcefulness and robustness in terms of innovation?
Stifle innovation? Really? Ya think?
Re:Licensing (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, even aside from the fact that in this case it appears it is being done for political reasons. State licensing has gone a long way toward ruining some professions, at least from the point of view of the public at large. Look at lawyers, just for one example.
Here's what happens as soon as a profession gets "licensed" or "certified". (I saw this happen gradually in the field of networking, after they started offering network certifications, like Novell CNE, and MCSE:
Some self-proclaimed licensing or certification body (if it's not the state) comes up with a certification exam. (Or, in more egregious cases, several to many exams that must be passed.) Not long after, tech and publishing companies begin to publish "Study courses" on how to pass the exam. When I was studying for my MCSE, I had several complete sets of books, some of which retailed for as much as $400 per set.
Soon -- very soon -- lots of big companies have a huge investment in this certification. And they lose lots of money every time the exams change. Also, the certification bodies rarely keep up with new technology. And worse... certification becomes the only indicator of who is "a professional" in that field. And so everybody who has already passed it has a stake in making sure that certification is difficult to get. Further, those who have passed certification feel they have earned their wings, and consider themselves tenured professionals. They don't feel they need to constantly study and keep up with everything new anymore.
As a result of all this, innovation in the field begins to slow. People who have licenses usually get paid well. But as time passes -- at least in tech fields -- they become less and less relevant. Sooner or later, they find that industry has passed them by and they have become dinosaurs. So they get a job flipping burgers or something to pay to go back to school (which no longer works, by the way: school is far too expensive).
So, no. I am sure there are exceptions, but in general, at least in tech fields, licensing or certification tolls the slow but sure death knell of your profession. To be replaced by something similar but not quite the same, 10 or 20 years later.
(Anybody remember CNE or MCSE? I never finished my MCSE, by the way: I saw the writing on the wall and went for a software career instead.)
Re:All for the sake of censorship. (Score:3, Insightful)