New Zealand Looks at Internet Censorship

David writes "The New Zealand Government 'Select Committee', upon reviewing censorship law, has issued a report which among other things, recommends that ISPs face compulsory licensing "in order to control their behaviour", the forcing of a code of conduct upon ISPs, and recommends the implementation of an internet filtration programme not dissimilar from that of Australia's (although it is hazy on the details of what this would mean). They're starting to become really worried about the dangers of the internet."

Comments

This is really interesting...

[SubliminalLove]

The first question this brings to mind is 'where is Old Zealand?'

I don't actually know much at all about their country, but I know it's a fairly well developed nation where people and sheep can live harmoniously. Is this sort of censorship common? The way the language in the paper refers to censorship (pg. 7) makes it look like censorship is accepted as a part of the government's job.

If that is in fact the case, how could this sort of thing work? Would ISPs be responsible for harvesting the URLs of all webpages with content offensive to the New Zealandic(New Zealish? Zealic? Zealaly?) government? That would be horrendously time consuming and expensive, and would be a constant chore. And we've talked about the consequences of blocking IPs on /. before. Would they be liable if a single thing got through?

I dunno guys. This sounds like a law without any teeth. If it's actually enforced, it seems to me (in all my ignorance) that it would result in NZish/ic/ian ISPs being unable to function. And even if it worked, it would take like three days before someone put out a program that simply went around the filtering. I mean, have your buddy in Seattle set up a webpage with a Java web-browser imbedded. Log into that site and ouila (wah-lah), you're knee-deep in scatological goat-rape porn. And I'm sure there's a way to set something like that up so that it would be very difficult to filter.

Okay, my ramble is done. I had to write a long time because I didn't want to be modded -1 for early posting ;).

~SL

Re:umm .... dammit! eep!

[B3ryllium]

Woo! I have been zinged!

Erm, wanged.

Erm, bah.

Bill of Rights

[Lord Ender]

Things like this make me proud to be a United States citizen. Our founding fathers did such a great thing with the bill of rights I can't imagine what our society would be like without them.