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Australia Ranked Fourth In Internet Freedom
mjwx writes "A report published by Freedom House has placed Australia in fourth in Internet Freedom, below Estonia, the United States and Germany. Freedom House highlights the lack of actual censorship in Australia pointing out that the highly unpopular proposed ISP level censorship has been shelved since the 2010 Australian election. The Freedom House report is available here."
I'm pretty sure Germany has actively filtered their internet before, and possibly still continue to do it. As for America, hello ICE domain seizures? Wtf.
Disagree != mod troll.
It's not even on the list.
Why not whoever is in 83rd place? It seems like "Estonia Ranked First In Internet Freedom" would be the real story.
What are the odds?
And how's that Wikileaks thing working out? Or the online gambling?
Its their fault
the only way to know for sure is to send em all back to Africa and see how it works out
Because I obviously live on Antartica, and have unlimited access with no caps. All the pr0n and free movies I want. Troll that, you homosexual noobs!
Estonia
Highest percentage of Hitler in population, too (higher than Germany and Austia!).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
So only a handful of countries in the world have internet now? Or are we ignoring countries that "don't matter"? If you're going to pretend to do comprehensive reports, at least have a comprehensive list.
Of course they're going to make sure the US gets near the top.
Estonia != Elbonia.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
You want to play adult rated video games on it.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
From TFPDF linked in TFA on TFFH website:
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
sure, the internet here is 'free'. Just don't try to bring any porn on physical media into the country..
While the Australian government might do little to censor the Internet, the country's terrible infrastructure and low bandwidth caps are de facto censorship.
Of which only 8 have 'free' internet. There is a lot of European and other countries that may have a more free web. Thus the rankings are pretty worthless. My extrapolating the results it would be likely that across Europe would most likely be 10 above the rest of listed non -European countries.
I would like to think New Zealand's web is more open than Australia's we do have a filter but it has not been forced on ISPs.
The ISP censorship has hardly been shelved, The only reason it hasn't come in is that we don't have a majority government at the moment, Labor party have stated they still want to censor the internet, they just can't currently get the numbers to do it, thankfully with their financial mismanagement, scandals and now child pornography we should be seeing the last of both state and federal labor at the next elections.
Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well. Not necessarily in GMB, but 'the west' never fully divested itself of the ideas; even after the NAZIs gave us a front row seat in how badly these things can go.
In Canada - I'm from - we have a leading political party that is as much at home with the eugenics ideals as the Tea Party is in the US. Most European nations have some political movement that is only a scratch or two away from this nonsense. They are singing to a choir, and the real trick is to fix the choir.
If Germany does so well to put this to rest, good for them, but it isn't the solution. A modicum of education - real education, not that blended crap to make the fundamentalists happy - and a societal urge to push the racist instinct into the margins is the only way to stop it. Otherwise, sit back and wait for it to happen all over again. History has no sense of humour whatsoever.
Decent people needn't suffer from racist hatred; it is a learned trait has deep roots in ignorance. We already know how to fix that, we just have to get the ne'er do wells out of the picture. Fundamentalists Anonymous has a cure!
What rank is China ? Is there anyone below ?
I would love to RTFA, but I can't access the report myself. They must have some technical difficulties in Beijing these days, because freedomhouse.org seems to be unavailable.
When you look at Australia's pornography laws I don't see how you can say they are the 4th ranked. Particularly when you understand that any depiction of sex by minors, even purely WRITTEN such depictions, you know done only with text, constitutes child porn in Australia, much to the horror of authors.
It's the active filtering which has been shelved, but the active filtering is only an attempt to extend the existing legislation from Australian servers to foreign traffic, and even then they're only postponing it (ostensibly until after a review has been conducted, but it likely has more to do with the shaky state of the parliament at the moment).
Even the current laws are amongst the most restrictive in the western world. Pornography is definitely banned on Australian servers, R18-rated content (at the same level as movies like Pulp Fiction or The Godfather) is effectively banned because it isn't allowed to be hosted without valid age verification (i.e. credit card details, with obvious ID theft issues if you're expected to provide such details to every site you visit), and for commercial content, it's MA15+ content that receives such restrictions.
Maybe the classification reviews will actually remove some of these ridiculous constraints and give is R18 games while we're at it, but I'm not optimistic.
With the exception of Germany, Estonia and Australia, they have only surveyed countries that score very low in other democracy and citizen rights indices. The reason that Germany and Estonia don't get better scores in this index, is that they are part of EU and have to follow EU regulations, which, other then purposely restricting the freedom of EU citizens in them-self, also is hard to fit into local laws and regulations (especially in countries that follow the Scandinavian or Germanic traditions of lawmaking, it fits better with the Latin and Anglese tradition) and therefor create unpredicted restrictions (Estonia likely succeeded better because it have a less fixed (=newer) set of regulations and a more Latin/Angese like law system then Germany, that can better work with and around directives from EU), but there are much worse EU members (as illustrated by Italy and UK, despite that Italy is a very young country (only 150 years) it has accumulated an awful set of to many and to complicated laws and regulations, that makes it very bureaucratic and only semidemocratic and UK, well it is UK, to much old crusty fucked up traditions and laws, censorship, military fighting within the country and social class barriers, like USA, not really democratic in the modern sense of the word).
Democratic countries within EU, would unfortunately score as bad as Estonia and Germany, but there are a few democratic countries, that don't follow orders from EU (or USA, or Russia, or China), that I believe would get a perfect zero.
compare to falklands (3,000 people) or lichtenstein (35,000)
estonia is over a million
the point is,somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million people and up, you are talking about a coherent internet policy and a system of accountability involving many people
but somewhere between 100,000 and 10,000 people and down, and you're talking about "uh, call bubba, he runs that stuff"
so i consider estonia's internet freedom reputation useful and valid, but not liechtenstein's
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why did it choose to mention who is number Four, as opposed to, say, number 26 on the charts? Why not say "US leads in Internet Freedom"? Is there a private conversation here that /.'ers aren't seeing? Or do I need my morning coffee?
"Yes. When you read the headline and it says, so and so is number four, it means, We attack at dawn. If it says, so and so leads in freedom, that's the signal to Abort the mission. If it mentions Estonia in the headline, that simply means His Highness prefers pepperoni, hold off and we'll decide tomorrow.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Why is there only a fraction of the worlds' countries on the list? Seriously flawed!
How can any country achieve any (meaningful) rank if not most countries are on the list?
Sweden for example would be very interesting to see with all new fuck-ups and yet the nice tradition of a free 'net.
There are lots of entries of countries that would rank in the top 10. I can tell you Romania would rank either 1 or 2 in that top.
After reading the USA on the top of the list I knew this article was completely false.
Common sense tells me that freedom is determined by practice, not theory. I don't give a damn what the law says, and why should I? Neither do the people who run the business of government -- the constitution itself is trash to them. (If the constitution was actually respected, the US federal government would be 1/10 the size it is today, measured both in revenue and power over the people.)
Nor will I ever display that automatic respect for democracy so common among "first world" people, or make any assumptions regarding freedom under democracy. Given the choice between a monarchy that respects individual liberty and a democracy that criminalizes it, you're god damn right I would choose the monarchy.
Concerning the relationship between an individual and the government assuming power over him, theory means absolutely nothing. Practice means everything.
Let's go further.
This report is actively dangerous, in a sort of flamebait FUD way.
Let's just do one example - how about Sweden, (former?) home of the Pirate Bay and the Party thereon, and key pawn in the coercion attempt against, wait for it, Australian Julian Assange from the UK led by the US?
Oh wait!
Those three countries get slots 2, 4, and 5 and Sweden is ... uh... censored?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Hell yeah. Proud to be Estonian.
Every once in a while discussion seems to pop up on the subject of freedom of expression on the Internet but so far, as for making decisions, common sense seems to have prevailed. I hope that it stays that way for a while more.
It is laughable how countries like Germany and Australia could score high on a measure of internet freedom when their censorship of what people can or cannot say means that the website doesn't get created in the first place.
There's a lot about the US I don't like but one of the things I very much do admire is their freedom of speech. Germany and many other countries in Europe are slowly gagging the public from saying many things which those in power do not like. To put any of those countries near the top of a list of countries which have internet freedom is laughable.
Freedom is on the back foot and the bigots and censors imagine they are freedom fighters. we're in trouble - unless you're a bigot or censor of course.
Australia is also one of the few countries to enforce download (and sometimes upload) caps on most of the available Internet plans, and will shape traffic to about 64k, 128k or (rarely) 256k once the caps are reached. The pricing model is outrageously overpriced (e.g. my folks pay AUD $29.95 for a 15 GB cap, with 10 GB counted as "off peak", which is from 2:30 am to 9am!!) compared to other comparable nations (US, Korea, UK, France, Japan) including the future National Broadband Network (NBN). Freedom? Try loading a media rich website at 128k! ..and then there's that filtering plan..
From the organization's "About" page:
Freedom House is widely recognized as the definitive source of information on the state of freedom around the globe.
And yet the 'global' assessment left out many major countries eg. Canada, Japan, etc.
So, neither definitive nor global and, when you read it, meaningful. Why was this posted? Is it because Australia was out of the top three?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
See ei ole internet vabadust. See on Internet Vabadus!
I'm trying to figure out if this is sadder for Australia that it scored so low, or for the world in general that Australia scored so high.
Accidental moderation removal.
Part about Estonia written by estonian government official, former head of state internet advisor.
never been able to find a German whose family were Nazis
OK, I’m not German and I never have been. But my parents were German (they have dual citizenship and so does one of my brothers). And my mother’s(?) cousin(?) was an SS officer. (I can’t be bothered to call up my father to ask the specifics: it was fifteen years before my birth.) On the other hand, one of the cousins/uncles(?) of that generation was Jewish. It all makes no difference to me.
They are run by the Jew...
Why is Brendon O'Connell in prison? Oh, I forgot - he said something that Jews didn't like.
Who took away your freedom of speech? The Jew.
Your Australian Eentanet: Fourth in Fraydom, Fehst in Cost*.
* And somewhere way down the list in international bandwidth.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
what is so pro about paganda
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
When comparing Australia to countries that kill bloggers, it's not much of a surprise that AU comes off looking better. On the other hand, it appears Freedom House has used the internet to evaluate internet freedom, and it stands to reason that unless their access if free, the information they've accessed may not be entirely accurate!
I read the bit on Australia and here's interesting examples
1) First they say internet access is affordable and high quality. Later they mention statistics which show a massive discrepency between rural and Indigenous Australians and urban Non Indigenous Australians.
2) First they say that the ACMA is considered fair and transparent (by whom is unclear) and then mention that the classification system is criticised for a lack of transperancy
3) Their interpretation of RC material is NOT how it actually works in ACMA - sounds more like one of Conroy's spiels. RC content is defined as that which is 'morally unsuitable' by the secret board that classifies material. So if they say that two men kissing is morally unsuitable, it's blocked. They didn't mention this aspect at all, nor did they mention that the board is secret.
4) On the upside, they went into a bit of detail on the data retention rubbish
5) On the downside, they claim that Australian press freedom is quite good (except when that press is trying to make it more free) but fail to mention the media duopoly/monopoly and how this is related to AFACT which is part of the anti-internet freedom movement here, in fact, they mentioned nothing about AFACT, Chowdroy, or any of the recent developments concerning that. In fact, they mention nothing nothing nothing about the new treaties the US is trying to impose, how this relates to the old USFTA,
TL;DR, thumbs down. This report is not comprehensive, and it is biased.