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Australia To Consider Licensing Streamed Content
TheSync writes: "The Australian Broadcasting Company is report ing that the Australian government is considering whether Internet streaming video and audio should come under the definition of broadcasting, and thus be liable to licensing requirements by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. Other articles on this issue can be found at TheAge.Com.au and Austra lia IT. This could lead to streaming
licensing fees and possibly more censorship." Seems like the legislature believes that Australia should be an island unto itself, instead a well-connected island.
Licensing broadcast media makes sense because, and was originally done because, there's a limited amount of broadcast frequency available and because broadcasting effectively travels across everyone else's property.
Not so of web broadcasts--there's an effectively unlimited number of frequencies (URLs) and bandwidth is plentiful. The two rationales for licensing streaming content are therefore censorship and taxation.
As for taxation, I don't know how it is in Australia (can someone from Down Under inform us?), but here in the U.S. we don't even tax traditional broadcasters much for the frequencies they use--it's always annoyed me that the airwaves in the U.S. are practically given away to large corporations, when they should be rented by the government at a fair market value instead. But instead of taxing the corporations in this country, we tax the people... blech...
Censorship is of course the biggest issue here, and probably the one which most excites the Australian government. It amazes me that the same country which used to fairly often publish pictures of naked 16 year olds in the Australian version of Playboy, now restricts tightly even mildly sexual content on web sites, not to mention mere stories and text. Western cultures and societies have to start moving towards less censorship and more understanding of different viewpoints and their value, or endure a tyranny of the majority which will stamp out all individuality and turn us into something from an Orwell novel. Regulating Net video streams may not seem a step in this direction, but it is. Restricting violent video games, as a story from earlier today says Canada is doing, doesn't seem a step in this direction, but it is. Things which are personally offensive must be tolerated, if for no other reason than that each of us likes something or another that someone else will find offensive, and if we each got the government to censor what we don't like, nothing unique would be left uncensored.
That's why it bothers me so much when Australians censor sex, violence, and drugs on the Net, when Americans censor sex on TV and everywhere else, and when Europeans censor even unrealistic violence, when France censors opinions about WWII and even WWII relics, and when Canadians censor books and magazines about homosexuality. What kind of a Western Civilization does that leave us with? What kind of a future can we look forward to, when "global culture" emerges full of the censorships and biases of each country melded into one seamless McDonaldsization of mediocre sameness? We have to start working extra hard to make sure we emphasize our rights and freedoms, not our selfish desire to censor, because we're living in times when those very rights are in flux thanks to new media.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
In the United States, the theory on why the government should regulate broadcasting is:
- There are only a limited number of frequency bands out there to use.
- The electro-magnetic spectrum is public property.
(Or it used to be something like this).However, the Internet isn't limited to a certain number of bands, and the Internet isn't considered public property, so the FCC hasn't applied broadcasting regulations to the Internet (thank God!).
But in Australia, what is the theory behind regulating broadcast mediums? Would this theory hold that the Internet should be regulated as well?
--Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Will they be setting up a block on any streaming media arriving in Austrailia? Maybe they will require ISPs to block every unlicensed stream? What about buddyphone?
Anyone want a free trip or Australia? Just send some streaming media there, and they'll haul you off to Australia for a trial.
Fight Spammers!
As most Australians know, the media moguls (in particular Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, and to a lesser extent, Kerry Stokes) wield considerable power and few politicians dare to defy them. Possibly this "suggestion" has something to do with them trying to retain their power base. I agree that it's not a very sensible idea.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net