Slashdot Mirror
AU Internet Censorship Spells Bad News For Gamers
eldavojohn writes "Kotaku is running an investigative piece examining what internet censorship means for games in Australia. Australia has some of the most draconian video game attitudes in the world, and the phrase 'refused classification' should strike fear in game developers and publishers looking to market games there. Internet censorship may expand this phrase to mean that anybody hosting anything about the game may suffer censorship in AU. Kotaku notes, 'This means that if a game is refused classification (RC) in Australia — like, say, NFL Blitz, or Getting Up — content related to these games would be added to the ISP filter. [This would bring up] a range of questions, foremost of those being: what happens when an otherwise harmless website ... hosts material from those games (screenshots, trailers, etc) that is totally fine in the US or Japan or Europe, but that has been refused classification in Australia?' Kotaku received a comment from the Australian Department of Broadband Communication promising that the whole website won't be blocked, just the material related to the game (videos, images, etc). Imagine maintaining that blacklist!"
Once the flood gates of ISP level censorship are pushed open, it's simply going to keep cascading until our Mate's internet connection is "sanitized" to death, where sanitized is on a sliding scale depending on whoever is in power at the time.
And now...Slashdot is no longer viewable to Australians.
Which would be quite amusing, because it'd basically mean you had half the population looking for content the government doesn't want them to see.