Australia Wants to Regulate Internet Streaming

Paul writes "After an incident that occurred on a popular television show's internet stream, the Australian government has once again demonstrated that it simply does not understand the internet by indicating that they intend to regulate streaming video. I wonder what these geniuses plan on doing with porn streamed from Europe?"

Comments

Re:For those who are confused, its a turkey slap

[scum-e-bag]

Knock yourself out! Here is a video of the incident.

Poor summary of the situation

[The OPTiCIAN]

"Australian government has once again demonstrated that it simply does not understand the internet by indicating that they intend to regulate streaming video. I wonder what these geniuses plan on doing with porn streamed from Europe?"

This is a poor summary of the situation. It's clear from the article that the government's intention is the review regualtion, not necessarily (as the poster snidely suggests) to impose regulation on porn streamed from Europe. The outcome of such a review could reasonably be that material streamed from within Australia should meet certain guidelines. While this doesn't prevent trash coming from overseas sources, it does ensure that broadcasts where responsiibility lies within Australia meets certain standards. This is typically what governments seek to do, and would lead towards consistency with other broadcasting formats for shows which have a large, youthful viewership such as Big Brother.

About eight years ago the government did show naivity on internet regulation by passing measures that were unworkable and which were panned within the IT community and within sections of the Liberal party itself. However, the current minister has cleaned things up a lot. Her approach to internet regulation has been to encourage education of parents and availability of client-side filtering - which is exactly the approach that I'd expect most of the slashdot readership would endorse.

Notice that of all the players with something to say in this article the government is the most restrained - calling for a review but not going overboard with censorship demands. In fact, it has been the federal opposition in recent times which has called for ridiculous measures while the government has been realistic in its approach, even by the reasonable (but in earlier times typically conflicting) standards of Electronic Frontiers Australia. See http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/mandatoryblock ing.html

Slashdot editors - panning Australians for our bad internet regulation system may once have been fitting. However, it would be nice if you could review things a bit more carefully based on the evidence rather than knee-jerks to posts making grand claims about Australian policy. It's annoying to see my country being portrayed as stoneage based on bad evidence. This snide post is not a story and it shouldn't have been put through.