Rudd Labor Government Follows China’s Lead: Mandatory Internet Filtering
Posted by Jaymz, January 1st, 2008 in Everything/Nothing, News, Slice of Life, TechI’m actually in the process of writing up a bunch of other shit, but I thought I’d take a break from that to rant a little about the latest piece of Grade A bullshit that’s come across my plate lately.
If you haven’t heard already, then check this out: The Rudd Government in Australia will start implementing mandatory internet filtering. Not only are our censorship laws already draconian enough (and they’ve already proved that the censorship board doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing - Kiddy Grade was rated PG, despite containing extras that contained Lumiere very much naked, yet they rated Azumanga Daioh an M, despite being a perfectly innocent comedy series containing no nudity whatsoever), now they’re going to start filtering out what we are and aren’t allowed to look at on the internet. Oh hey, that sounds like someone else we know.
Naturally, when confronted with the fact that the Rudd Government are collectively tapdancing on civil liberties, Stephen Conroy immediately accuses us all of being child molesters. Also sounds like someone else who went around taking people’s civil liberties away, and when confronted, accused them of supporting terrorism.
Clearly, this is not going to solve the problem. If you don’t want kids looking at all the bad shit on the internet (ie, my site), then throwing money at the problem won’t do a goddamn thing. The internet is not just the web, and unless the Rudd government can somehow magically filter packets, what’s to stop ingenious 13 year olds from just downloading porn from torrents, Usenet or IRC? I’m all for making the internet a safe resource for children, but howabout getting to the crux of the problem? I’m talking re-educating the parents.
Both Windows Vista and Mac OS X nowadays come with fantastic Parental Controls nowadays. I say instead of spending billions of dollars on something that won’t solve the problem, and will only piss on our civil liberties, we re-direct it to the real problem of kids being on the internet in an unmonitored fashion. It’s the parents’ responsibility, not the governments.
To follow up, in the words of Benjamin Franklin (or possibly Richard Jackson):
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
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Luckily, that article mentions that we can opt-out of any censoring. Personally, I can’t see it affecting me terribly unless they start blocking 4chan. I’m interested as to who will be handling the classification of sites, because as you pointed the OFLC aren’t exactly shining examples of consistency.
Didn’t the Howard government propose something similar to this only a few years ago?
http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/PR070811.html
I’ve used ISP-based filtering in the form of the NSW Department of Education’s abortion of a filter before, and I can tell you now that if Rudd’s filter turns out anything like that it’ll be one big failboat.
Jesus Christ, they need to stop trying to do parents jobs for them.
It’s bad enough that we can’t buy R-rated games in this country.
As you say, Parental Controls in the OS are already more than good enough for most purposes. Additionally, if you’re using an OS where they’re _not_, then you have the option of enabling this feature on your router / DSL modem — almost any of these have content filtering built-in now. If you’re still too stingy to implement this (keeping in mind that a basic router can cost less than $50) then ISPs should offer it as an opt-in solution, NOT an opt-out like what Labor is proposing.
Households which don’t even have a child should not have to jump through hoops just to use the Internet as it was intended.
This reminds me of that time when Optus decided they would block SMTP to customer’s links without informing them, and required them to opt-out to get the functionality back (once the customer had discovered this — in my case it took a few days to realise the problem was at the other end of the line.) Censorship is more sinister though, as it might not be immediately obvious that you’re being censored, depending on exactly how they implement the response for the browser. If it just returns a 404, it would look like a problem at the other end and emails would be sent to the webmaster asking why bits of their site are down. :-)