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."

Comments

I have a better idea

[skinfitz]

Ban children from the Internets. By all means build a kindernet and police an regulate it to fuck, but leave the adult net alone.

How will this be enforced?

[Pseydtonne]

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.

.kid domain?

[iknownuttin]

Ban children from the Internets. By all means build a kindernet and police an regulate it to fuck, but leave the adult net alone.

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.

Re:.kids and .xxx are fundamentally different.

[Kadin2048]

Are you just trolling or are you seriously this thick?

Who'd want example.com when they could have example.xxx ? Why would anyone want the latter, particularly if it means they're going to be automatically censored in large parts of the country/world? I suspect there are lots of porn consumers who live blatantly hypocritical lives ("uh, sure, honey ... you can block .xxx, I certainly don't care about it..."). At any rate, it doesn't make much sense to restrict one's market. And with the price of domain names, the logical solution for any adult site would be to buy both: get yourname.xxx and yourname.com. This is the main driver behind the .xxx TLD in the first place -- it's a cash cow for the registrars.

I think in time any pron sites left in .com will feel pressure to move to "where they should be". Pressure from who? And why would they care? Certainly not social pressure. There are porn sites around for lots of, shall we say ... fringe activities; things that are certainly not acceptable in mainstream society. No amount of tut-tutting is going to push them into the .xxx ghetto when there's a clear ongoing economic incentive to remain in both. And as for government/legal pressure, that only works within the borders of a single nation; there's nothing stopping me from setting up a .com porn site in some neutral territory and thus reaching all those consumers stuck behind .xxx-blocks for whatever reason. The only way you could enforce this is with a national firewall and universal content screening.

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 .xxx proposals are about two things: they're an attempt by the registrars to make a few bucks, and they're a way for some social authoritarians to try and regulate the lives of others' and censor the public sphere by pushing content they find disagreeable into a walled ghetto.