If the reports are true that Netflix is preparing a bid for the Premier League’s global broadcasting rights, Indonesia may be on the verge of a structural shock in its media ecosystem. This is not merely about football. It is about how a single global platform, armed with capital, data, and distribution power, could overturn an entire domestic industry built over a decade of digital transformation.

Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, minister of defence, who is now seen among the strongest persons close to President Prabowo Subianto, gave a public lecture at Hasanuddin University in Makassar, South Sulawesi province on Tuesday (Dec 9). He talked about how 80% of Indonesia’s tins have been sent out of the country without paying taxes.

Indonesia has been struggling to reduce its dependency on imported liequefied petroleum gas (LPG) due to delays in coal-to-dimethyl ether (DME) projects. Oil palm plantation companies, however, have quietely added more bio-compressed natural gas (Bio-CNG) or bio-methane in recent years.

Finance minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa defended his plan to implement export tax on coal next year before lawmakers by saying “this is strange, these (owner of coal mining companies) are rich people, huge profit…I indirectly subsidized them (because of tax refunds)….”

Resort island of Bali remains the main destination for both domestic and international tourists. Out of 9.12 million foreign visitors entering Indonesia through air travel in the first ten months of 2025, more than 64% landed at Ngurah Rai international airport in Bali Island.

President Prabowo Subianto talked about the importance of oil palm plantation for the country’s energy self-sufficiency at the time of growing criticism in the society about environmental impacts of the sector, including the recent hydrometeorological disasters displacing over one million people in the northern tip of Sumatra Island.

For more than one decade, the Batangtoru hydroelectric power plant (HEPP) project in South Tapanuli regency, North Sumatra province has been under public scrutiny. Planning for commercial operation next year, the 510 MW project, which will make it the largest hydropower in Sumatra Island, has recently been temporarily suspended following landslide and flood disasters killing over 900 people.

The government through the Ministry of Environment has temporarily suspended the operations of three companies in Sumatra, namely mining firm PT Agincourt Resources (subsidiary of United Tractors/UNTR, member of Astra International/ASII), state-owned plantation firm PT Perkebunan Nusantara III, and hydro power developer PT North Sumatera Hydro Energy, regarding their land-clearing activities that might have caused the flood disasters killing hundreds of people.

In the past few weeks, we’ve read two different self-sufficiency targets in sugar sector. Minister of agriculture talked about self-sufficiency in ‘white sugar’ by next year, while the state plantation holding PTPN III pointed to self-sufficiency in ‘consumption sugar’ (non-industrial uses) by 2028.

Indonesia’s decision to appoint Roblox as an official collector of Value-Added Tax (PPN PMSE) may appear administrative on the surface, but it represents something far more consequential: govt is finally confronting the uncomfortable truth that global digital platforms have been extracting enormous economic value from Indonesian users for years—largely without contributing a proportional share back to the state.