They seem to have misunderstood both their own history and that of the Internet, which run strangely parallel. Today the streets of George Town, Penang's main city, are so vivid, crowded, and intensely multicultural that by comparison they make New York City look like Colonial Williamsburg. Every block has a mosque or Hindu temple or Buddhist shrine or Christian church. You can get any kind of food, hear any language. The place is thronged, but it's affluent, and it works. It's a lot like the Internet.

Both Penang and the Internet were established basically for strategic military reasons. In both cases, what was built by the military was merely a kernel for a much vaster phenomenon that came along later. This kernel was really nothing more than a protocol, a set of rules. If you wanted to follow those rules, you could participate, otherwise you were free to go elsewhere. Because the protocol laid down a standard way for people to interact, which was clearly set out and could be understood by anyone, it attracted smart, adaptable, ambitious people from all over the place, and at a certain point it flew completely out of control and turned into something that no one had ever envisioned: something thriving, colorful, wildly diverse, essentially peaceful, and plagued only by the congestion of its own success.

JARING's link to the global Internet is over an undersea cable that connects it to the United States. This is typical of many Southeast Asian countries, which are far better connected to the US than they are to one another. But in late June of 1996, a barge called the Elbe appeared off the coast of Penang. Divers and boats came ashore, braving an infestation of sea snakes, and floated in a segment of armored cable that will become Malaysia's link to FLAG. The capacity of that cable is theoretically some 5.3 Gbps. Much of this will be used for telephone and other non-Internet purposes, but it can't help but serve as a major floodgate between JARING, the censored pseudo-Internet of Malaysia, and the rest of the Net. After that, it will be interesting to see how long JARING remains confined to its pot.