Playboy is coming to Indonesia, Todd Crowell asks “where’s the outrage?” Yes, there is a from local Muslim groups, but shouldn’t us free-speech type’s be outraged that Playboy is compromising its values.:

..the Indonesian edition will not be the same Playboy we know and love in the U.S. The local publisher and the American parent have promised that Playboy Indonesia will “respect local values” — meaning no photographs of naked women. Or, as local promoter Avianto Nugroho says, “the contents will be suitable for whatever is acceptable in Indonesia.”

So here we have another large American company with world-wide brand recognition that wants to do business in a large Asian country that is censoring itself. Except that Playboy’s actions are more in the nature of preemptive self-censorship since there are no specific laws that would prevent the unadulterated Playboy from publishing in Indonesia.

The Indonesian criminal code does not clearly define what constitutes pornography. Parliament is working fix that now, but, like in other countries, the anti-porn bill is running into difficulties in defining what exactly is decent and what is indecent.

Playboy’s self-censorship hasn’t drawn the same censure that Google received for allowing Chinese authorities to block access to certain politically sensitive terms on its new Chinese-language search engine. After all, the Chinese want to block out such lofty subjects as “democracy” or references to the “Tiananmen massacre.”

All Playboy plans to censor are boobs.

But it might be argued that boobs are as central to Playboy’s products as “information” in the broadest sense is to Google’s business.

(image stolen from here.)

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