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Australia to Censor The Internet

Australia has just announced that it will proceed with controversial plans to censor the Internet after Government commissioned trials found that the filtering and blacklisting of banned sites was accurate and would not slow down the Internet.

Why on earth would a western nation impose strict Internet filters? Possibly one of 2 reason…actually I’m sure it’s both.

1. These politicians have no idea on the notion of freedom without bounds
2. These same politicians are uneducated and sadly misinformed on the adverse affects to the community

Sure I get it, we need to protect minors from harmful material such as child pornography…that’s clearly obvious. But these things have already been implemented by the Internets biggest players. All major search engines exclude such content from their indexes. Further, home PC software and browsers have built in features to prevent such explicit material being accessed in the first place.

The Australian government by moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime has opened up the ability for them to go beyond such material and censor content which would otherwise be useful. This has to raise concerns to all Internet community members not just in Australia but from around the world.

What Australian politician have demonstrated here is their inability to think beyond the horizon and consider what such a move will mean in future. We will be restricting access to socially and politically controversial material on the Internet….so What? The Internet was designed for this. Take for example, information on how to overcome drug addition, euthanasia, access to gay and lesbian rights…controversial yes, should be restricted?..NO!

A pole run by the Sydney Morning Herald had over 20,000 respondents. 96% disapprove of the proposed changes. Hardly a surprise.

An except from Whirlpool (A large Australian forum and community of Internet interested users) states many reasons why the idea is bad. The salient points:

1. The ideals of a representative democratic society oppose censorship;
2. Australians have demonstrated they do not want it;
3. Blacklisted sites are kept secret from the Australian public;
4. It is easily circumvented or bypassed;
5. It will increase the cost of broadband;
6. Filtering products incorrectly block legitimate traffic;
7. It introduces another source of failure and Internet outages;
8. The filter is proposed to filter HTTP traffic – which is not all protocols
9. Those viewing child pornography will take additional steps to ensure their traffic is better protected (encryption, anonymizers such as TOR) to avoid censorship, which will hinder law enforcement;
10. It will give parents a false sense of security regarding online content;
11. Children aware of the filter will deliberately attempt to find filtered sites and bypass the filter;
12. Top Internet Service Providers oppose the proposal;
13. Shifting parental responsibility to the ISPs/Government does nothing to prevent societal problems;
14. There are too many individual URLs on the web, that any blacklist containing only a couple of thousand URLs will prove highly insufficient in an attempt to protect people from inappropriate web content;

The type of material which maybe blocked will not always be pleasant. But that does not give the government the right to potentially rule the Internet for it’s citizens with an iron fist. It’s going in a backwards direction to the American FCC who have recently expressed greater freedom to Internet users and created a great beta site Open Internet to collect public opinion. Australians sometimes strive so hard to be like their American big brother – why could they have not copied the FCC views? Why have they now changed and become the worlds Internet Neanderthals?

It’s a sad day to be an Australian (I hang my head). It will be an ever sadder day should Australia truly proceed with the censorship of content and become partial guardians of the Internet.

Tags: australia, censorship, FCC, freedom, government, Internet, open internet

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 1:23 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.