If anything has been made clear in the last week it’s that someone in the Rudd government has kicked Stephen Conroy’s arse over the internet filter. I don’t know what it takes to parade around the country spouting complete nonsense with a straight face, but whatever it is… Conroy continues to prove he has it in abundance.

Fresh from the abyss Conroy has been on a whirlwind positive PR campaign for the government’s proposed internet filter. Complete with a mountain of mistruths and distorted information, Conroy’s latest claim sees him plunge to entirely new depths.

According to Conroy, filtering the internet isn’t censorship.

In a speech to the Sydney Institute last Monday, Conroy stated that

The internet is an incredible piece of technology and in our lifetime it’s unlikely we’ll see anything like it again, but for all its technical brilliance, the internet is a distribution and communications platform.

Having no regulation to combat illegal activity actually weakens all that is good about the internet.

Those who claim the government’s approach is akin to the sort of political censorship practiced by authoritarian regimes are simply misleading the Australian public.


Censorship, as defined by Wikipedia, is

the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor.


I’m pretty sure the internet constitutes communicative material and that the Australian government qualifies as a government. Regardless of how much Conroy harps on about his precious refused classification, censorship is censorship so let’s stop pretending filtering the internet isn’t.

As for Conroy’s other claims, many would assert that the very fact the internet is largely unregulated is all that is good about the internet. Sure, the law is the law but shouldn’t the onus be on me to break it or not.

If I do break the law, then by all means hunt me down and prosecute me. However attempting to remove the option to do so shows a great level of mistrust and lack of confidence in its own people on behalf of the government.

The government is supposed to serve us. Nobody said anything about dictating policy.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification website states that

The Classification Board is required to apply the law and classification guidelines in order to make its decisions. This occasionally results in material being refused a classification, which means that it cannot legally be shown, sold or hired in Australia.


The term shown refers to public viewing. It is not illegal to own or view refused classification material, assuming the material is not illegal in itself.

Now of course child pornography et al. are illegal to own but we already have systems and law enforcement in place to combat this. I mean seriously when was the last time you heard of child porn on the internet being produced from within Australia?

Filtering the internet is going to have a negligible effect on child porn activity in Australia seeing as it’s all done via peer to peer and private networks, both of which will be unaffected by the internet filter.

While Conroy continues to bumble around Australia proving to the world that he’s either the world’s greatest believer in a nanny nation or clueless (or both), the UK recently passed an internet censorship law of it’s own.

Much stronger then Conroy’s internet filter, the UK’s ‘Digital Economy Bill’ provides some revealing insight into the direction internet regulation in Australia is heading under Stephen Conroy and the Rudd government.

The main worries over the Digital Economy Bill is the enabling of the British government to block

a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright.


and

allow the Home Secretary to place “a technical obligation on internet service providers” to block whichever sites it wishes.

A “technical measure” is a measure that — (a) limits the speed or other capacity of the service provided to a subscriber; (b) prevents a subscriber from using the service to gain access to particular material, or limits such use; (c) suspends the service provided to a subscriber; or (d) limits the service provided to a subscriber in another way.


In other words the British government now have the power to block whatever they want.

Given Stephen Conroy and the Rudd government’s headstrong rhetoric and refusal to engage public debate (not carefully planned television segments) on the proposed internet filter, just how long do you think it’d be before Australia was staring down the barrel of its own Digital Economy Bill?

The British government has already seized control of the internet and the Australian government won’t be all that far behind. Time to wake the hell up Australia, the internet as you know it is hanging in the balance.


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