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Australia Plans to Censor the Internet
SenatorLuddite writes "From January 20, 2008 new content laws introduced by the Federal Government will force sites to verify the age of users before accessing content intended for mature audiences (MA15+ and R18+). The laws bring internet classification into line with Film and Book classification laws and completely prohibits X18+ and RC content from the internet. ACMA (The Australian Communications and Media Authority) claims that adults will not be affected by the new laws, yet user-generated and even chatrooms are required to be assessed for classification and powers are granted to ACMA to send 'take down' notices to offending sites."
Ban children from the Internets. By all means build a kindernet and police an regulate it to fuck, but leave the adult net alone.
First note that this applies only to new services and only to live services.
It doesn't bother me that there is a movement to classify content and restrict mature content to mature audiences. The article was scanty on how the age verification would be done, but honestly, I have a hard time thinking that trying to restrict content online in the same way our (US here) system restricts printed material is really a bad thing. It does not say that the providers cannot provide content, it just says that they must limit access, the same as access to other things is restricted. Here we limit access to voting, access to tobacco, access to alcohol and of course 'adult' media already. This seems like a rational step in the same direction for Internet media.
Of course I expect to be told I'm wrong, I'm just curious to hear why.
Back in my day when we chiseled our bits into stone and sent them by mule train from village to village...
Neither link provides any detail about how they're going to make such rules stick. What will be the fine for a blogger in Brisbane that talks about goat sodomy?
Also, how would such a crime be prosecuted? Most police work in Australia is state-based and not federal. I'm assuming there is an equivalent to the FBI which will handle detection, evidence collection and prosecution.
Are they going to use packet filtering to detect what people download or will they simply be picking on ISPs hosting content for not hassling their web serving customers?
Honestly, I'm not being sarcastic. I'm just looking at this as a scare tactic without teeth, since the notice from Canberra makes no mention of tactics. Please provide links if you find them.
"Personal emails and other private communications would be excluded from the new laws..."
Oh, well, thank god for that. For now.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Why not? Have a .kid domain, have the kid oriented content publishers (ex. Disney, FisherPrice ) finance it, and let parents restrict the internet to that domain.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
You get what you want and pay for.
Want to be treated like a serf? Consent to be governed by others and be told what to do... consent to have some depraved power hungry, child molesting lunatics legislate morality to you and your children. (Sort of how the "conservatives" permit boy raping priests to tell them how to be good "Christian" men... which, if priests actually lead by example, is obviously "lie your ass off, rape little boys, be a hypocrite about it, don't get caught, and become a diocese before long.")
Politicians aren't crooked only in the USA, they're the same everywhere, they just get caught more in North America and Western Europe. But I love the braindamaged point of view I hear (mostly on authoritarian forums, whether left wing or right wing notwithstanding) where "we elect them to represent us" or "they represent the will of the majority" or some such bullshit.
Voting is a lottery. It isn't the will of the "majority" or the "will of the people". Voting is a gamble, is my winning ticket going to rip you off to pay me for however many years, or will your ticket screw me to pay you? After all, once you gamble, you cannot complain that you didn't consent because you lost. You consented to be ruled when you consented to play their game. If you didn't register (research that word) or vote, you can say you withheld your consent, but you cannot withhold your consent if you registered and voted and lost the lottery. Freedom does not enter into the whole thing. Once you've registered and voted, you've cast your freedom into the lottery, and whichever side wins (not you, but the ticket running) gets to own your freedom and you. Speaking of which, ever wonder why they say "X is running with Y on the ABC party ticket"? Doesn't it seem strange that they should use the same terms as that other state operated enterprise? The Lottery?
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
1. Post thread explaining the plan. Include picture of a kangaroo. Or boobs.
2. Say "go go go".
PROFIT!!!
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Don't make the mistake of thinking this kind of thing isn't the way of the future, and not just in Australia.
Already we've seen US web sites having to self-censor to comply with European censorship laws, and conversely, content hosted in the EU taken down when it violates US copyright laws. We've seen US companies cooperating with China's regulation of political speech. Governments are fearful of the unregulated nature of the internet, which means that over time, that unregulated nature is going to go away. They all have a vested interest in grabbing more control over online communications.
This from AU is a small thing. But a million small things taken together can be a big thing.
If *everyone* on the net would start using anonymous proxies for everything, it would help, but only a tiny, tiny fraction of online users have the necessary awareness, understanding, and motivation to do that.
So.. How long until America tries this? I'm shocked we haven't already. I mean, then we'll really be living in a dictatorship.
In the UK, BT's internet service blocks /b/. It's on some blacklist because, well, you know that bear mascot of theirs? Yeah. That stuff. To their credit they left the rest of 4chan alone, which is impressive given that if they blocked /b/ they must at least have looked at what goes on in /d/.
To be fair, 4chan doesn't permit child pornography, and cooperates fully with the FBI whenever it shows up, turning over IP addresses and chat logs. Also,~ C.
My favorite was a website requesting CC# for verification purposes. Right next to the entry field was a link to a CC# generator website. To me that was the ultimate example of the futility of the proposed US legislation. Without requiring every website that hosts adult content have a CC processing account, there is no way to even validate that the CC# is actually tied to an account. You can check if it's potentially valid, but not if it's actually valid without trying to process the card.
All forms of 'validation' are pretty much pointless when it comes to this. Unless they can figure out how to do a national authorization database with 2 factor authentication and anonymization , this is pointless. Here in the US, it was too much effort to do 2 factor for the BANKS, can you imagine trying to get everyone set up for this?
And this whole scheme doesn't do anything about adult content that appears on sites other than ones 100% dedicated to porn. You're always going to have imageboards and interactive/user-created content sites that are going to tend towards 'adult,' because that's what people are interested in. You're not going to change that through any amount of legislation.
The result is that no matter how much you try, there is always going to be adult content available in the 'general' Internet. And that means it'll never be "porn free," ever, undermining the whole point of the endeavor. You can't make the Internet, in general, "safe for kids," because the Internet is mostly populated by adults, and much of what adults want to talk about is, well, adult. So not only is it a recipe for censorship and unnecessarily burdensome, it's futile in terms of actually achieving its stated purpose. There's already a kids domain. It was a huge flop. Yep, very true. The take-away point here? Nobody really gives that much of a shit about protecting kids, or creating a 'safe zone' for them. The
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So, if we take on premise that children need to be 'protected' from some content, I think it's more practical and less philosophically repugnant to create safe-zones around children than to try and 'child-proof' the entire world except for certain 'adult zones' where we allow uncensored conversations to take place. Basically, if you go into a kids' zone, you agree to self-censor. If you don't want to do that, you don't have to go in.
Similarly, if you wanted a site in
This is a pretty fundamentally different process from trying to censor everything that's in the general TLDs and force everything that's 'kid-unfriendly' into
Now, I'm not saying this would be the best solution -- I think the overall best solution would be to educate kids so that they won't be harmed by 'adult' culture as early as possible, rather than keeping them in bubbles, and I think DNS may not be the best way to signify the 'adult-ness' of content on a page -- but it's certainly better than trying to force all 'adult' content on the Internet into a 'free speech zone.'
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Should it be "wikipedia.xxx"?
Who decides - America, Iran, France?
America would ban porn but allow violence.
Iran would ban everything critical of Islam.
France would forbid the use of the swastika symbol online.
Who do you want censoring your internet?
By the way, it is permissible to write paragraphs of more than one sentence.
It makes things easier to read if you do that.
Reading a post written like this is quite annoying.
I thought you might like to know that.
Please, if that's the way you feel, feel free to stay right where you are
Huh? If that's the way I feel I should stay out? How does that make sense? Because I'm not happy with the conservative nature of both parties right now?
There's still a *lot* that I like about the Australian political system. It's certainly not the three-ring circus that America has, and while it's clearly unbalanced some of the time, it's usually fairly sane, and gets quite a fair bit right, particularly it's ability to represent smaller parties.
For instance, regardless of what I thought about the man's inability to do his job, Senator Alston did push for better internet access, particularly in rural areas. Quite frankly, I fully believe that Australian internet is better (albeit slightly more expensive) than what's available in the US (these people haven't heard of ADSL2+ yet, they're trying to roll out fibre to the home, and at crappy speeds too). What I don't agree with is parties pandering to the ultra-conservative nature of people in order to play on the family-first sentiments that seems to exist.
Of course, with the way teenagers and young adults act nowadays, I'm not surprised that people WANT to do something to control them. The problem I have is that they're doing it too late to help the current lot, and they're not doing it the right way (It's called discipline people! an absence of porn or violent media isn't going to do anything to fix them!)
The other problem is that it's blown out of proportion. Most people are sane and good-natured, regardless of how much porn or violence they see. A minority are not, and the media does as much as it can to sensationalize it to the limit.