Australia’s telecommunications minister, Stephen Conroy, has announced that Internet access to all Australian houses and schools will be subjected to censorship and not, as previously claimed by the ALP as an opt-in service. We will, allegedly, be permitted to opt out. How kind. Note that before the election the service was to be opt-in.
Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road
No apologies. The Great Firewall of China is known to block:
- Wikipedia
- YouTube
- Web sites belonging to outlawed or suppressed groups, such as Falun Gong and pro-democracy activists
- News sources that often cover some taboo topics such as police brutality, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, freedom of speech, democracy, and Marxist sites.[10] These sites include Voice of America, BBC News, and Yahoo! Hong Kong
- Sites related to the Taiwanese government, media, or other organizations, including sites dedicated to religious content, such as CBETA, a site that provides the complete Chinese Buddhist canon. The Taiwanese-language version of parody wiki Uncyclopedia (as zh.uncyclopedia.info) also appears to be blocked, as of Sept 2007.
- Web sites that contain anything the Chinese authorities regard as obscenity or pornography
- Web sites relating to criminal activity
- Sites linked with the Dalai Lama and his International Tibet Independence Movement, including his teachings
- Most blogging sites, such as blogger.com, wordpress.com experience frequent or permanent outages
- Web sites deemed as subversive
If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.
While most people wish that child pornography and terrorism did not exist, humanity should not be deprived of their freedom to communicate just because of how a very small number of people might use that freedom. In any case, Mr. Conroy seems to be confused about whether he’s protecting children from viewing pornography (child pornography no less!), or trying to stamp out pedophilia, and not even from the angle of those abusing children to produce it.
There are people who are going to make all sorts of statements about the impact on the [internet] speed
In discussions around this topic under the previous government, feedback from ISPs regularly indicated that there would be both costs associated, which would have to be passed on to consumers, and that there would be an additional barrier to the speed of data transfer associated with any filtering. Even if I can opt-out, I’m still going to end up paying for the service, one way or another.
Make no mistake, this is a backwards step. Migration looks more and more appealing.
