Alfreido's Blog

Something that has crept up on the Australian Internet community lately which is probably the most controversial thing that has happened in the history of Australia’s internet usage is the announcement by our new Labor Government and their intention to introduce a mandatory filter to every ISP currently operating in Australia. It’s sparked many disapproving thoughts throughout the Australian Internet community and I thought I would weigh in on the issue and give my opinion (even though I’m sure no more than 2 people really give a shit). I’m not going to launch into a whinge about how we are becoming alarmingly similar to China’s current state of Internet (ableit with less bandwidth available to us) where the government can instigate a ban on a website without the public being able to scrutinize the decision, but instead, I wish to analyze just how far this sort of mandatory blocking of questionable websites could go, and what it could do to Australian Internet.

For those not in the know, basically, the mandatory filter is going to be activated on every ISP on an opt-out basis (ie. you have to go out of your way and opt-out of the filter to be allowed to use your Internet fully again). It will then mean that every site you visit on the Internet will be checked against a blacklist of sites with questionable content (ie. pornography, violent content, messages to Allah/God/Santa) and if you have yet to opt-out, you will not receive the site, and will more than likely receive a message along the lines of “You dirty perv, the Australian government believes you should not be allowed to view this site, so ner-ner.” What possible explanation could be given to institute such a ridiculous system? Well, let’s queue Reverend Lovejoy’s wife for a second… “OH PLEEEASE, WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?”. Basically the new Labor Government (ie. Kevin Rudd and Senator Stephen Conroy) believe that something has to be done to protect the children from viewing inappropriate material whilst surfing the web, at the expense of everyone else’s viewing experience.

How is this going to inconvenience Australia? Well, let’s have a quick think:

• If the blacklist is quite big (which it will mostly be, considering the amount of filth on the Internet), every time you visit a website it will have to check against EVERY site on the blacklist before it will let you continue. This could slow down the Internet immensly. This would then directly contradict another promise delivered by the Labor Government, the promise of fast broadband widely accessible in Australia.
• The blacklist is rumored to have two levels, an R-rated level and an X-rated level. R-rated level, which is softcore porn, questionable but not offensive material, etc. will be viewable once you opt-out of the filtering. However, X-rated sites will continue to be blocked even after being opted-out, hence the Australian government is directly interfering in the content that you can view.
• With a population of around 20 million in Australia, it can be safe to assume that around 50% of Australia will want to opt-out of the filtering program. So that is going to be at least 10 million calls to customer service divisions all around Australia. We could easily see a massive increase in wait times for customer service, at least while that 10 million or so people get sorted out.

There’s are just some of the side effects of this filtering system, but what is even worse is how far this sort of system could go, if the Government was to avoid a backlash from the churchies or whingers who asked for this system in the first place (sorry, but I have to be blunt and take a leaf from Chopper Reid: “Harden the fuck up”).

Think a Big Brother scenario, where if you opt-out of the filtering, your actions on the Internet will be monitored. It’s already been hinted by the government, it may not be official policy yet but it’s definitely a possibility that it will be implemented. The government could implement ‘flagging’, where if you view any page which has the certain words (like say, ‘doggy-style’, ‘anal’ etc.) would be flagged and could be blacklisted very shortly. Sites like Youtube, Myspace, Facebook etc, they could easily be flagged and blacklisted as there is questionable material on there. Search engines like Google (which already automatically redirect to the Australian version of the site) could also be forced to have search results filtered, just like in China. The outcry which happened in China when this happened would happen all over again, and would undermine Google’s aim of being a search engine which delivers true search results. The search results would be only the ones that got through the filter.

This is a VERY slippery slope that the Government is taking, and I think it could destroy the crucial young vote that Labor relied on to actually get here in the first place, because I’m sure there’s a lot of teenagers who would be very disappointed that they can no longer bat off on a Friday night over those porn sites. It’s a major fuck-up in my opinion, and I really hope that the legislation is kicked out or the public outcry so large that the Government would be forced to back down, because once they implement it, it can only get worse, never better.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 1:16 am and is filed under censorship, government stuff-ups, internets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.