PETALING JAYA: Malaysians have been barred from some DALnet servers not so much because they were breaking DALnet rules, but because Malaysian Internet service providers (ISPs) were not co -operative, a DALnet official said.

"The Internet is based on co-operation and the only recourse DALnet has when people fail to co-operate is to exclude them," DALnet webmaster David Schwartz said in an e-mail to The Star.

Schwartz was responding to local news reports that Malaysians have been barred from some DALnet chat servers.

He said that complaints to Malaysian ISPs about Malaysian DALnet offenders were often rebuffed with replies that ISPs only issued accounts and did not care what subscribers did with their accounts.

Mimos Bhd (government sector) vice-president Dr Mohamed Awang-Lah denied that DALnet complaints had gone unheeded.

"If there is any evidence that Jaring staff gave such a reply, we will take action against the staff concerned," he said.

On the contrary, Dr Mohamed said that Jaring has not received any complaints from DALnet, at least for the past three months.

Mimos operates the Jaring Internet service.

Dr Mohamed said that it was difficult to communicate with DALnet administrators as they were mostly volunteers.

"Sometimes they don't even know the importance of giving us the exact time of any incident, taking into account the different time zones.

"The time at which the offence takes place is critical- -we don't want to catch the wrong person," Dr Mohamed said.

He said that Jaring takes chat abuse seriously and has full-time staff to follow up on every abuse complaint.

"We are very concerned about abuse because it affects the quality of our service," he said.

Dr Mohamed said that Mimos has issued warnings to about 100 people for "abusing" their accounts and most of them have heeded its advice.

"We do suspend and terminate abused accounts," he added.

While DALnet's Schwartz concurs that it's extraordinarily rare for all users from a particular country to be banned from DALnet servers, he says it is quite common to exclude all users of a particular ISP.

As Malaysia has only two major ISPs, (Jaring and TMnet), barring users from them would in effect bar a majority of Malaysian users.

TMnet corporate communications head Sharifah Md Ismail said that to date, TMnet has not received any formal complaints from DALnet.

"However, if we do get an official and legal request, we will co-operate and assist in the investigation," she said.