Malaysia denies web traffic rerouting plan ‘draconian’ as censorship fears rise

The directive, which takes effect on September 30, has prompted new concerns, including from some ruling party officials, of growing online censorship and fears that it could jeopardise the country’s digital economy.

DNS is a system that translates domain names into numerical addresses used by computers to locate websites on the internet.

While local internet service providers, or ISPs, often operate their own DNS servers, some web users use public DNS servers, such as those provided by Google or Cloudflare, to gain faster internet speeds or access websites blocked on local ISPs.

Under the government plan, user requests from such third-party DNS servers will be redirected to those operated by Malaysian ISPs.