Indonesia has banned the privacy-oriented search engine DuckDuckGo. According to a report by the news agency Reuters, the country’s communications ministry has cited concerns that the browser could be used to access pornography and online gambling websites, which are illegal in Indonesia.
With the world’s largest Muslim population, Indonesia enforces strict rules against sharing obscene content online.Platforms like Reddit and Vimeo are already blocked in the country.
What Indonesia said about DuckDuckGo
In a statement to Reuters, Usman Kansong, a communications ministry official said that DuckDuckGo was blocked due to numerous complaints about widespread online gambling and pornography content in its search results. However, the ministry did not specify how DuckDuckGo differs from other search engines like Google.
DuckDuckGo’s website states that it offers several products to “help people protect their online privacy,” including the search engine, which has also been praised by privacy advocates.
In recent months, Indonesia has vowed to crack down on online gambling, banning access to several such websites.
Despite being illegal, government data showed 3 million Indonesians gambled online last year, spending an estimated $20 billion, or about 1.5% of the country’s gross domestic product.
Reddit blocks DuckDuckGo and other browsers
Last week, social news platform Reddit restricted search engines including Microsoft Bing, DuckDuckGo and others as well as some AI bots from accessing its data to favour those who pay. This move came after Reddit updated its rules for crawling bots, with Google being the only search engine which has been reportedly exempted.
Earlier, in June, DuckDuckGo started offering users the ability to interact with popular AI chatbots like OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s Llama, and Mistral’s Mixtral without revealing personal information.
This feature, called AI Chat, is free to use but has daily limits. Users also have the option to turn off the AI Chat function entirely. DuckDuckGo is also planning to expand the service by adding more chatbot models and access points in the coming days.