Thread: Internet Censorship - again

Over the weekend there was a very significant development on the internet censorship front .

The National Party has passed a motion opposing any mandatory internet censorship.

It is worth pausing to consider this for a moment - the most conservative mainstream political party in Australia has decided that this is not a policy they should support.

It is now up to the Liberal party - or perhaps a backbench revolt in Labor - but certainly it does put pressure on the Liberals to make clear their stance on the subject. The result from the Nationals almost certainly reflects their constituents writing clear and well reasoned letters to their representatives. If your member is Labor or Liberal ..........

John

As most are probably aware, the internet censorship plan has been put on hold until after the election and pending a review of the "refused classification" classification. It is worth noting that last time classification was reviewed, there were exactly 147 submissions made to the process. More than a third of these submissions were may by two fundamentalist letter writing groups in two NSW country towns. And the changes made then to the classification rules bore no relation to the recommendations coming out of the review, being significantly more restrictive.

Also, announced at the same time was that three of the largest ISPs Telstra, Optus, iPrimus) have agreed to voluntarily censor their customers using a list of child pornography web pages supplied by the government. According to a statement by one of the other ISPs which has declined to join this group, they do not expect it to happen soon, due to the fact that the mechanism to either filter or to supply the list does not exist and the cost of equipment, estimated to run into millions. A further problem is that Telstra has specified that they will need legal protection before starting to do this. This protection probably would include amendments to the Telecommunication Interception Act, and it seems very unlikely that the required amendments would pass the Senate.

It seems likely that the announcement was only a bit of pro-Labor electioneering by the companies in response to some sort of secret deal. In any case, it should be noted that blocking CP web pages is supporting CP. They should be referred to the police who, liaising with international colleagues, can get the material removed quite quickly, and possibly even manage some arrests. Most informed observers believe that there is a vanishingly small amount of CP on the web anyway, and its lifetime before being removed is in most cases shorter than the time taken to get onto the list.

(This of course excludes "CP" which is only identified as such in Australia).

John