According to news published on June 14 2024, the circulation of money in online gambling reached 400 trillion rupiah. This is of course a very fantastic number. This figure is much higher than the government budget allocation for higher education in 2024, which is only 56.1 trillion rupiah.
On the other hand, Kominfo claims to have cut off access to 2.5 million online gambling content since 2023 (Kompas, 15 June 2024). Kominfo also threatened to impose a fine of 500 million for every piece of online gambling content found on digital platforms such as Meta, X, Telegram or others, according to the same source. So what if the content is found on a government or campus site.
Many government and campus sites have been infiltrated by online gambling content. We can easily find this content via Google by typing “site:go.id slot” without quotation marks to search for online gambling content nested on government sites via Google. Meanwhile, the keyword “site:ac.id slot” can be used to search for online gambling content infiltrated into campus-managed sites.
Even! A few days ago, the National Police Education and Training Institute website was also used to post online gambling content by irresponsible people.This is really ironic. When the government is very aggressive in trying to eradicate online gambling, it seems like it is facing an open challenge and is being heavily attacked. When this news was conveyed to Kominfo via platform X, no response was given. It’s possible that they already knew about this, but they just couldn’t handle it because there was so much new content appearing.
We can imagine that the hundreds of trillions of rupiah that revolve around online gambling are more than enough capital to create Auto Generated Content (AGC) bots and tools to distribute spam content on a massive scale. With just one click, thousands or even millions of content may be distributed to target sites that have security vulnerabilities. On the other hand, perhaps Kominfo took down the content manually. Even if it is done automatically, it may still be less sophisticated than the bots created by online gambling managers so that a lot of online gambling content still perches in Google search results. Most of this content is indexed on the AMP Project so that even if the site is taken down, the online gambling content can still be accessed temporarily because it has been stored on Google’s servers.
Lastly, I would like to quote one of the dialogues of a character in the film Once Upon a Time in Hong Kong, Nash Pak, Chief investigator of the Independent Anti-Corruption Commission (ICAC), which means something like this: We will not be able to stop this crime if we only catch the perpetrators. . The most important and main thing is to catch the boss and the people who secure this business.
