Mohamed Sharil Bin Mohamed Tarmizi is the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (SKMM). Previously, Sharil was the Executive Director and Head of Strategy in BinaFikir Sdn Bhd, a financial advisory and strategy consulting firm. He first joined SKMM in May 2000 to take up the challenge of ‘boldly going where no one had ever gone before’ to help the country implement the world’s first convergent legislation, the Communications and Multimedia Act 1998 (including the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission Act 1998).
In the international arena, Sharil has worked closely with the main international organizations in the Internet field, such as the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers2 (ICANN), where he was the second past Chairman of the Government Advisory Committee (GAC) and a board member of ICANN4 for 4 years from 2003 to 2007. He successfully navigated the GAC and assisted ICANN through the challenging early years of the debates surrounding Internet Governance at two United Nations World Summits on the Information Society in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005). He has also worked with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in the areas of capacity building and helping countries undergo regulatory reform in preparation for globalization. In particular, he was involved in the further development of the T elecoms Reference Paper for the Telecommunications Sector as well as the drafting of the Postal Services Reference Paper for the Postal and Express Delivery Sector. He was also one of Malaysia’s lead negotiators for the telecoms sector in various rounds of WTO negotiations as well was the various Trade or Economic Cooperation agreements that Malaysia has had, namely Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
Sharil was also recently elected the Vice Chairman of the ITU Council’s Child Online Protection initiative, an initiative to address the ills of cyberspace particularly against young persons and children. In recognition of his in-depth knowledge of the communications and multimedia sector both locally and globally, immediately after he left SKMM as a staff member, he was appointed a Commission Member of SKMM by Tun Dr. Lim Keng Yaik, (the Minister then) from 1 May 2006 and he served for two terms on the Commission. His term ended on 30 April 2010.
