Internet Censorship - again

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Originally Posted by Captain_Rightfoot

Are there any members in particular that are more involved in this than others?

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Not really - only if you are Victorian, Minister Conroy is one of your senators, so you can write to him as your representative. Apart from that it is important that as many members and senators as possible from both opposition and government are told that the voters oppose it. They may be able to influence their party's caucus in private, although the ALP maintains such strict discipline that no ALP members are likely to vote against it unless caucus can scrap it. Failing this, it will pass in the House of Representatives. In the Senate, the only cross bench senator who is likely to vote for it is Fielding - Xenephon and the Greens are on record as opposing it.

The opposition has made no stance clear, although their spokesman Minchin has opposed it, so writing to opposition members and senators is most important. The problem is that the opposition discipline is nowhere near as good as the government's and there is a real possibility that even if it is opposed by official opposition line, enough opposition senators will cross the floor for it to get through.

Fears have been expressed that it will get bundled with the Telstra split-up legislation as a package, and with the Telstra legislation having overwhelming public support, they may get it through that way.

For full details of the scheme, and fully referenced discussion, see libertus.net and look for "censorship system", "Internet".

John

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Originally Posted by Crackerjack

I cannot believe that a country such as Australia would even consider such censorship, this is the sort of thing they do in communist countries like China, I already believe you have "gates" on your internet as it enters Australia, and from someone outside the country, your web sites are very slow.
What happened to the easy lifestyle and laid back attitude of Australia, it is being eroded by the do good and PC brigade.

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I am in China now and you are not kidding about the internet censorship I can't get some of the photos on this forum or pictures on google not even my own land rover wesite is available here.

See [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YchJlHoFCfw"]YouTube - Censordyne - GetUp![/ame]

As some of you may have noted, yesterday Senator Conroy released the long awaited filtering test report - and announced that internet censorship is going ahead.

The report (which I urge you to read yourself - see Home | Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy) is a pretty sorry document for something that is supposed to be a scientific report. It is lacking a lot of the data that is needed to justify its conclusions (no information on number of proportion of ISP customers used in the trial for example), contains almost straight out incorrect facts about matters of public record such as legislation, and the tests appear not to have tested IPv6, already available from some ISPs, and tested a maximum speed of only about 10% of the benchmark speed for the NBN. Also of interest is that despite the fact that Conroy told the Senate in early October that he already had the report, according to the PDF properties of the document released, the underlying Word document was last revised a couple of days ago. I am sure there is an innocent explanation, but a cynic might think that the last two months were spent massaging the report to present the desired result.

The proposed censorship will now be exclusively of material that is Refused Classification (or is "probably Refused Classification"). This category covers a vast range of material which is legal for most Australians to view or possess (but not to sell). The blacklist will be based on complaints. Considering that there are over a trillion URLs, and the department's current time taken to assess a complaint seems to be about two months, it seems unlikely that it will make any significant impact on what you can find on the web. (Presumably, unless you publish something that will embarrass the government, when it will accidentally end up on the list due to a "caching error"). And of course, amendments to increase the scope are much easier than new legislation - how long before advocating use of polluting four wheel drives will be refused classification?

Since the censorship now proposed will do nothing to protect children from unsuitable material, and will, in any case, be ineffective (both because of the numbers and because it is trivial to bypass), you have to ask what purpose does it fulfil? It will put Australia in breach of articles 18 and 19 of the UN declaration on human rights, which Australia helped to formulate, but has never implemented.

If you don't like this idea, I suggest you write to your Federal MP, or do as I have done, write to Senator Conroy and copy to your MP. Of course, if you do like the idea, do the same!

John

It's all about thin end of the wedge and getting control of the internet, isn't it?

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Originally Posted by Captain_Rightfoot

Australia is a great country. However I fear we are loosing it. We allow governments to take away our rights and if you question them you're a bad person. Hmmm.... :(

As to the "clean feed" it's going to be a complete mess.

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What rights?

We don't actually have any in Australia. There is no "bill of rights" we are governed by legislation and regulation. Our freedom is only what's left after all the prohibitions and legislation are taken out.

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Originally Posted by Lotz-A-Landies

I think you will find that the "gates being slow" as you suggest is more a function of too many users in Oz using up the bandwidth of the available links to the outside world. This seems to be the habit of Oz based ISP being happy to oversell their infrastructure but not so happy to build new infrastructure to handle the customers need for bandwidth. This is particularly relevant with the downloading and streaming of video and audio.

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geez i get sick of hearing this drivel

having been a sysop / isp since 1989 i think i am safe in saying that the biggest reason australian isp's sell their connections the way they do was / has more to do with the fact that internet connectivity was wholesaled by volume of data not by pipe size as is common in most other countries.

the imbalance of data pulled from US versus data put back out of AU meant AU isp's always had no bargaining power.

add to that, mr howard did whatever he could to ensure that continued as it inflated the price of those telstra shares i bet you own...

a lot of boutique isp's offered a way around it but were bought out by bigger players when the AU dollar fell to 55c in the US$ a few years ago.

until the start of the afghan war when the yanks took over the satellitte i was using, i was myself bringing in data direct from the american backbone to my little 1000+ userbase in caboolture to get around it but you could only do it on a small scale because as soon as anyone got a whiff that you were AU based, they slapped you with data charges not pipe size charges...

the effects of this still remain today... the mindset is now part of the issue.

but, the major issue is the tyranny of distance and by world standards, very low population densities

very hard to buy an unlimited data connection to this day for this very reason, and i dont mean telstra's version of unlimited.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Rightfoot

It's all about thin end of the wedge and getting control of the internet, isn't it?

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I'm not sure what it is about. It is sold either to "stop the distribution of child pornography" - which it won't do because virtually none is on web pages, which are all it affects - or to "protect children from unsuitable material" which it won't do because it will only block Refused Classification; most parents would be unhappy about their children accessing X18+ material, for example!

John

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Originally Posted by Crackerjack

I cannot believe that a country such as Australia would even consider such censorship, this is the sort of thing they do in communist countries like China, I already believe you have "gates" on your internet as it enters Australia, and from someone outside the country, your web sites are very slow.
What happened to the easy lifestyle and laid back attitude of Australia, it is being eroded by the do good and PC brigade.

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Mate you can fit the British Isles 7 and one half times in my state Queensland.When I lived in Runcorn UK if I travelled the distance across Australia ..4500K's I finished up in Egypt.Hence the problem here re broadband distance.Australia is a big country and it appears Telstra is the only ISP able to update to very fast broadband.This has all been held up since its sale as it is now just like Woolies and Coles ..answerable to it's shareholders and making their return as large as possible much to chagrin ( higher costs etc) of their users ( or customers)
Cheers,
John ( disco 44 )

The whole Australian idea of 'A Fair Go' has gone, right out the window.