Studies of 'the state' in cyberspace, as exemplified by case studies of China, Russia, and Iran are mostly focused on authoritarian regimes and their strict policies with respect to censorship, propaganda, and control. As more and more nation-states are stepping up efforts to extend their sovereignty into the internet domain, I argue that it becomes increasingly important to go beyond such a binary opposition between ‘authoritarian’ and ‘liberal’ internet regimes and, in particular, that it might actually prove more fruitful to study the regimes ‘in-between’: the supposedly semi-authoritarian, pseudo-democratic states, in order to get to a more nuanced and complete understanding of the state in cyberspace. My research takes Malaysia as a case study, examining its state internet policies and practices: what the state does, what it does not, and it attempts to answer the question: why (not)? Based on empirical data from eight months of fieldwork, I will show that, although the state is definitely interested in establishing sovereignty over its internet domain, state power on the internet in Malaysia is actually remarkably uneven and fluid.