Singapore’s Online Criminal Harms Act gave the authorities power to direct online services to act against criminal content. What has happened in 2026 is a change of kind rather than degree: the unit administering that power has become a standing regulator issuing binding codes to named platforms, with penalties large enough to change global product…

Australia banned social media for under-16s. Malaysia has signalled it will follow. Singapore is doing something different, and the difference is instructive for anyone operating a consumer platform in the region. Start with the schools The most concrete measure took effect first and attracted the least international attention. From January 2026, Singapore secondary schools enforce…

Singapore has opened the consultation that will determine how its intellectual property regime handles artificial intelligence. The Ministry of Law and the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore launched it on 26 August 2026, and submissions close at 5pm on 22 October 2026. The copyright questions The consultation paper addresses three areas on the copyright side.…

Artificial intelligence has a heat problem. Racks running AI training workloads generate power densities that air cooling cannot economically handle, which is why liquid cooling has moved from niche to mainstream in three years. Doing it in the tropics is harder, and Singapore has just published the first standard addressing that specifically. What was launched…

Two announcements dominated Singapore’s National Day Rally on 23 August 2026. One was about babies. The other was about islands. They answer the same question from opposite directions: how a city-state with a shrinking birth cohort and no hinterland plans for the second half of the century. The fertility problem Singapore’s total fertility rate fell…

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan spent decades treating immigration as something other countries did. Demography has ended the argument. Japan and South Korea are approaching a position where fewer than two working-age people support each person over 65, and all three are now expanding routes for foreign labour. Japan’s rebuild Japan’s system has been rebuilt…

The idea of a Southeast Asian electricity network has been discussed since the 1990s. It is finally acquiring construction schedules. The ASEAN Power Grid Advancement Programme is rolling out sub-regional pilot projects for multilateral power trade from 2026, building on existing bilateral arrangements, with the long-term ambition of linking all member states into a single…

Hong Kong spent several years being written off as a listing venue. The numbers for the first half of 2026 argue otherwise. The exchange hosted 85 new listings raising roughly HK$210 billion, up about 92 per cent year on year and the strongest first half in five years. PwC projects HK$380 billion for the full…

Indonesia has spent a decade insisting that it will not remain a supplier of raw material to other people’s factories. Export bans on unprocessed nickel ore forced smelting onshore. The question now is what happens when that logic is applied to everything else, and run through a single state institution. The vehicle Danantara, Indonesia’s sovereign…

India passed a data protection statute in 2023 and then left the market waiting for the rules that would make it operational. Those rules arrived in late 2025, and with them a phased implementation timetable that runs through to mid-May 2027. Companies treating 2026 as a quiet year are misreading the calendar. The dates that…