Sintercom

Sintercom

Other names	Singapore Internet Community; Singapore Electronic Forum (predecessor project)
Status	dissolved
Type	Non-partisan online forum for discussion of Singapore political and current affairs
Purpose	To provide a platform for free-flowing discussion of Singapore national issues, along soc.culture.singapore lines
Leadership
Coordinating Editor / Founder	Tan Chong Kee
Co-founder & Editor	Wynthia Goh
Organisation
Formed	21 July 1994 (32 years ago)
Region served	Singapore
Revenue	Non-profit
External links
Website	(defunct) Official website

Sintercom (Singapore Internet Community) was a non-partisan online forum for discussion of Singapore political and current affairs, founded in 1994 by Tan Chong Kee and maintained by a volunteer editorial group that peaked at around twenty people, many studying or working overseas. The site drew regulatory attention twice, in 1996 and 2001, over Singapore's licensing rules for content providers discussing politics and religion online. Tan closed the site in August 2001, after being required to register it as a political website with the Singapore Broadcasting Authority (SBA), rather than continue operating under the self-censorship he believed registration implied.

Background

Sintercom was founded in 1994 by Tan Chong Kee, then a graduate student at Stanford University, who began the project as an archive of selected discussions from the soc.culture.singapore Usenet newsgroup, since most Internet service providers at the time did not retain Usenet postings for more than a few weeks. Tan's own account directly resolves a discrepancy in earlier reporting: a Straits Times profile published in May 1996 instead described Tan as a PhD student in Harvard University's Asian Languages Department and dated the site's founding to "last July" (i.e. July 1995); that account is now treated as the outlier rather than an equally weighted alternative.

Volunteers were drawn from the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University, as well as overseas universities including Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, London and Oberlin, and quickly expanded the site's scope; Sintercom went on to produce Singapore's first Singlish dictionary, its first online food guide, and its first comprehensive online report on a general election, and secured early online interviews with figures including diplomat Tommy Koh and banker Wee Cho Yaw. (This list of volunteer institutions in Tan's own account is the likely source of a separately circulated, unsourced claim that Tan himself held a Cambridge degree — in Tan's account, the Cambridge affiliation belongs to one of many volunteers, not to Tan.)

By his own account, Sintercom passed through three broad phases: an expansion phase from 1994 to 1997, hosted overseas and drawing an increasing number of volunteers; a decline from 1998 to 1999 as many volunteers graduated and took up careers, including in the Singapore civil service; and a final two years, 2000–2001, in which Tan describes having run the site largely alone again.

By May 1996, the site had recorded more than 30,000 hits according to its own counter. By July 2001, Sintercom's operators put monthly traffic at between 250,000 and 300,000 hits. The site had no formal hierarchy; decisions were made by equally weighted vote among its editors, conducted by e-mail, and the group had formally decided not to turn Sintercom into a money-making enterprise.

Mission and Content

Sintercom hosted an online forum, the Singapore Electronic Forum, mirroring discussions from the soc.culture.singapore Usenet newsgroup and inviting posts on any topic; postings were organised under headings including politics, economics, transport, military affairs, education, mass media and society. Individual editors retained autonomy over what they published under the Sintercom banner — for example, a black-ribbon campaign against Internet censorship ran as a project of the editors who supported it, on condition its backers appended their real names to it. From 1998, as some original editors returned to Singapore, they launched further projects on the site: "Not The Straits Times Forum," publishing letters the newspaper had rejected or substantially edited, intended to press it toward greater editorial transparency; a project monitoring and commenting on local news coverage; and, alongside other activists connected through the 1998 grassroots initiative The Working Committee, an attempt to establish a dedicated media-watchdog NGO. The site also ran a companion resource called Vote Watch — dedicated to the memory of David Marshall, Singapore's first Chief Minister — providing background on the Constitution, the major political parties and past electoral results. By 2001, co-founder Wynthia Goh's principal role was compiling SG Daily, a mailing list distributing news articles and commentary about Singapore.

Sintercom's editors argued to the authorities that the site was not primarily political, since it also carried non-political material, and that its overtly political component was essentially an edited mirror of the soc.culture.singapore bulletin board, which was not itself subject to SBA registration rules. By 1998, the site had gained enough official acceptance that it was hotlinked from the government's own "Singapore Infomap" web portal, and Minister for Information and the Arts George Yeo named Sintercom, in a May 1998 speech on civil society, as one of several civic organisations that encouraged Singaporeans to be more socially conscious.

Notable Public Incidents

1996 SBA registration exemption

In July 1996, the SBA announced that websites seeking public attention on politics or religion would need to register with it, and named Sintercom as one of the affected sites. Registration would have required Sintercom's webmaster to accept full personal responsibility for everything appearing on the site — including unmoderated reader postings on its forums — and, by Tan's own account, to supply the authorities with the salaries and employer details of those involved in running it.

The announcement prompted a public campaign against the rules by people associated with Sintercom. Editor Harish Pillay wrote a critical letter to The Straits Times within days and chronicled the episode on his own homepage; Tan Chong Kee, unable to reach quick consensus among Sintercom's roughly twenty volunteer editors, published his own detailed critique of the rules on the site and e-mailed several thousand of his own contacts to raise awareness; and co-founder Wynthia Goh set up a dedicated feedback page that drew mostly critical public responses, many signed with real names. Tan's own account describes this as a highly successful campaign that drew more than 250 people to argue against the proposed rules under their own names. Contributors to the resulting debate included forum users Gerard Lim and Francis Chong, and a junior Ministry of Information and the Arts official, Stephanie Sim, who argued publicly against the rules, closing one comment with the line "we want RESPECT, NOT REGULATION."

In 1997, Sintercom's editors accepted an invitation from Philip Yeo to consolidate the site's content onto a single server located in Singapore, a move intended to make its Singaporean readers feel safer engaging with it. Tan's own account describes Yeo at the time as chairman of Singapore's Economic Development Board (EDB), while Cherian George's 2006 secondary account instead describes Yeo's role as chairman of Sembawang Corp; both are accurate rather than conflicting, since Yeo held both positions concurrently — he was EDB Executive Chairman from January 1986 to January 2001, and separately Chairman of Sembawang Corporation from 1994 to 1998. Yeo's negotiations are also credited, in George's account, with helping broker meetings between Sintercom's editors and the SBA's chief, the chairman of the National Internet Advisory Committee, and the Minister for Information and the Arts. Tan Chong Kee met SBA officials in September 1996, shortly after formally establishing Sintercom in Singapore, and the SBA subsequently told him in writing that registration was not required, citing its assessment of the site's content and Tan's assurance that his editorial group would exercise responsibility, intelligence and maturity in selecting postings.

2000 Registry of Societies rejection

Sintercom's editorial group sought recognition as a formal society under the Societies Act, but its application to the Registry of Societies (ROS) stalled. The group had submitted its own draft constitution rather than the ROS's standard format, and the ROS objected that the draft lacked the features it considered necessary for a society's management and control — including a named president, where Sintercom's editors argued the group had no such hierarchy. With the society application unresolved, Sintercom's operators also began pursuing incorporation as a company instead.

May 2001 forum-hosting dispute

In May 2001, Sintercom's online forum was taken offline amid a dispute between Tan Chong Kee and the moderator of the Singapore Java Users Group (SJUG) forum, which hosted Sintercom's discussion board. Tan alleged the moderator, posting under the username "Smallfry" (separately identified in the report as Dennis Lee), had replaced the Sintercom forum with a different one without consulting the Sintercom editorial group; the moderator in turn accused Tan of falsely claiming he had deleted the forum's posting database and of trying to redirect traffic to a commercial site. The public exchange drew other forum users, some of whom urged the two to resolve the dispute privately.

July–August 2001 SBA registration order and closure

On 5 July 2001, Tan Chong Kee received a letter from the SBA requiring Sintercom to register within a fortnight as a political website, on the grounds that the site engaged in the propagation, promotion or discussion of political issues relating to Singapore. Tan said he was puzzled by the reversal given the SBA's 1996 exemption, and the authority did not explain to reporters why the requirement was being reimposed or whether the timing was connected to a separate directive on political parties' websites issued around the same period by then-Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong to the Elections Department; the SBA said it did not regard the Sintercom matter as linked to that directive. Other Singapore-based sites carrying political content, including littlespeck.com and singapore-window, said at the time they had not been asked to register.

The July 2001 order followed the Singapore Broadcasting Authority (Amendment) Bill passed in April 2001, which extended broadcasting-style restrictions on domestic political content to bring online media in line with print, and separate amendments to the Parliamentary Elections Act barring non-party-affiliated websites from promoting or campaigning for any candidate or party. The Committee to Protect Journalists' 2001 review of Singapore separately noted that the same period saw a broader requirement for civil-society and advocacy groups to register as political organisations, which also affected Think Centre and Open Singapore Center.

Rather than close the site immediately, Tan submitted the registration forms, modifying them to remove a clause he believed infringed his rights. He then adopted a compliance strategy of forwarding links to all of Sintercom's existing published content to the SBA for clearance, reasoning that doing so would satisfy the licence condition to take "all reasonable steps" to comply, without requiring him to pre-emptively self-censor. The SBA replied that it did not pre-censor content and that operators were expected to exercise their own judgment, and separately issued a public statement describing registration as a routine administrative procedure.

In his own later account, Tan frames the decision in terms of a trade-off between Sintercom's public standing and its founding mission: continuing under the self-censorship that registration implied might have restored the site to a more comfortable position with the authorities, but only by abandoning what it was founded to do, so "we chose to close down instead."

Sintercom closed in August 2001. As an informal, volunteer-run site with no corporate registration, it had no formal closure procedure or filing to pin the date to; the commonly cited date of 20 August 2001 (given in the English-language Wikipedia article on Sintercom) sits between two contemporary press accounts — a 22 August 2001 Computer Times piece on Tan's decision, and 24 August 2001 coverage describing Sintercom as already shut down, alongside the separate closure of Think Centre's "Speakers' Corner" online forum — and is used here as the working date on that basis.

May 2002 anonymous GeoCities relaunch

On 8 May 2002, press reports confirmed that a new operator, unconnected to Sintercom's original editorial team and choosing to remain anonymous, had begun running a forum under the Sintercom name at geocities.com/newsintercom/. Contemporary headlines described this as Sintercom having been "revived." The Straits Times' report, by Tan Tarn How, stated that the SBA said the new site would be required to register as a political website if a complaint were made about it, and quoted the anonymous operator rejecting any need to go underground or to register. Because this GeoCities-hosted forum was run by a different, unidentified individual rather than by Tan Chong Kee or Sintercom's original editorial group, it is treated in this article as a separate operation that reused the Sintercom name, rather than as a continuation of the original site or its editorial team — notwithstanding the contemporary press's own "revival" framing.

Aftermath and Legacy

Tan Chong Kee had reportedly been considering winding Sintercom down independently of the SBA matter, in part to focus on a separate initiative, the MediaWatch Community, which had by mid-2001 obtained a licence to operate. Tan went on to co-found The Working Committee (TWC), an informal network of Singapore NGOs formed in the late 1990s to collaborate on civil-society activities; a secondary source describes the efforts of Tan and fellow Sintercom editors Chang Li Lin, Wynthia Goh and Harish Pillay as having "set the stage for others to follow."

In June 2002, Tan resurfaced in public life as a member of the Remaking Singapore Committee, chaired by Dr Vivian Balakrishnan, then Minister of State for National Development, and including Raymond Lim, then Minister of State for Trade and Industry and for Foreign Affairs. Tan was reported to have been persuaded to join by Lim and Balakrishnan, and took on oversight of the committee's public e-forum, which had received about 700 e-mails from the public by the time of the report.

Editors

Individuals identified across sources as having held editorial roles at Sintercom:

• Tan Chong Kee — Founder, Coordinating Editor
• Wynthia Goh — Co-founder and Editor
• Harish Pillay — Editor; publicly documented his opposition to the 1996 SBA rules on his personal homepage and in a letter to The Straits Times
• Chang Li Lin — Editor, per a secondary source describing her among Tan's "fellow Sintercom editors"