The Rudd Government, reluctant to force parents to be responsible for what their children see on the internet, is about to introduce a mandatory net filtering regime at the ISP level. This has civil libertarians aghast – not because of the filter as such, but because the list of banned IP addresses will not be made available to the public.
Under this draconian legislation, sites that have ‘refused classification’ (RC) rating will be blocked at the highest level – the ISP’s are obligated to replace any sites that are on the mystery black list with a ‘censored’ page.(and I presume it will be an offence under the new law to reveal the list). No other country in the OECD at present has a secret list not available to the public, although there are plenty of them in places like China, Iran, North Korea and other totalitarian, socialist, fascist or religiously fundamentalist countries.
The ‘selling point’ that Minister Conroy uses to justify these measures is the perceived disgust at pedophile sites showing pictures of children in sexual poses. But for good measure the government has tossed in other reasons which are more likely to cut across peoples’ right to an open internet – sites that advocate suicide, self-harm and euthanasia, terrorist techniques and methods, sites showing how to do criminal acts such as break and enter, anything relating to drugs, bestiality. The exact definition is also secret, of course. And the chances of sites being banned because of certain words and phrases creates an obvious problem for lawyers, psychiatrists, doctors and others who may need to look frankly at things.
In the poster case, pedophilia, it is interesting to note that child sex offences have actually dropped by half in the last ten years. But despite this, the pedophilia witch hunt is hugely popular with the authorities in their moral mode and the media in their venal mode. Doubtless it has many citizens hurrying their children to shelter at the sight of middle aged men in cars. There are probably ads on TV warning children about it.
Conroy attempts to justify his stance by comparing the internet to ‘all other form of publication, like books, papers and TV’, which are rated according to suitability by the government Censorship Board. But according to the Electronic Frontiers Australia action group, this is not true. The internet is quite a different thing. In the case of a banned book, the publishers are made to withdraw it from sale through their printing and distribution network. A banned film will not be seen – the distributors will have been forced to remove it from the cinemas. And so on.
But the internet has no single responsible publisher and it is it’s own distribution network. This creates two difficult problems for a censorship regime. Firstly, any person who is determined to post RC material and who’s site is blocked can simply set up another site and use email to advise his clients, or use a proxy server, or use P2P techniques (to be completely invisible).
There is a very broad spread of sexual innuendo and depiction in our communities, ranging from gentle TV ads for perfume to hard core porn with violence, intimidation and assault. But at the level R18, explicit sex is allowed and available to any horny teenagers out there. The difficulty apparantly starts when little Johnny who is five accidentally turns on the DVD big sister got out last night. Or he clicks on an URL that unintentionally leads to a sexually explicit site. According to senator Conroy he will, from that day on, be damaged. Like a loss of innocence maybe?
Usually accidents like that are so remote from a childs mindset that there is no real comprehension of the meaning. Psychiatrists may disagree and some people are more at risk than others.
The cultural commoditisation of sex proceeds apace, with little girls dressed like Barbi. It is now money AND love that make the world go round.
A divisive side issue is the ‘oh dear the internet speed’ complaint. Note how this will cleverly be used by the filtering advocates as a blind, viz: “there is no effect and no likelihood of a slowing down at the new promised NBN, as the rates are XYZ faster etc”.
It’s just not knowing what you are missing. I think it will lead to an increase in public attention to sex rather than less. Someone, sooner or later is going to release the list, and who wouldn’t want to have a look at some of the sites, just out of curiosity?
anyway, have a look at http://www.efa.org.au/censorship/mandatory-isp-blocking/#SS_2
