Australia’s Internet Censorship Plan: Where Are We At?
Image: Aeriana on Whirlpool
It is still unknown as to where we are at when it comes to Internet censorship in Australia. With the Government continuing to not respond to media enquiries, it continues to make it difficult for people like myself to write about their side of the story. What do we do whilst people continue to get frustrated about this? Complain? Well that’s about all we can do.
It’s been a number of weeks since the Government have said anything about their policy to protect children from harmful material on the Internet. Whilst the Government continue to stay ignorant of what the public are telling them via emails, snail mail, forums, protests and the Government’s attempt at a blog, ISPs have not even been informed of what is going on; the main stakeholders mind you.
The Government are leading us astray, announcing in a statement just before Christmas that…
As predicted by many, the Government had not set a ‘real world’ timetable of how they should implement a live trial. With them announcing in their expression of interest documents the following time line. Note the commencement time-frame for the trial.
Request for Expression of Interest Document
That’s correct, except that it’s not happening. How did the Government think that they could implement a trial before the end of 2008? It really is a joke. We’re almost up to mid-January, so I assume we should be receiving an announcement this coming week from Conroy’s Department.
I guess the problem with Government porfolios is that they need not know anything about it. That’s the issue many see with Senator Stephen Conroy. The issue with managing a portfolio based on Technology is you need to know the language, as many know that technology can be at times difficult to understand.
Ben, thanks for linking to my piece about needing to know how to manage IT. It’s a theme I return to quite often. If Conroy’s department imagined they could notify ISPs mid-December and have some sort of technology in place before Christmas then they clearly have no idea how IT projects work. Even on a small-business scale it takes several weeks to re-arrange a network, and it’s even more difficult with a “live” ISP network.
It’s interesting to note that they refer to it as a “pilot” rather than a “trial”. A trial is a test, an experiment. A pilot is a draft version of the real thing. But none of this has been defined well enough to have a working system at the end of it.
All the signs point to complete and utter incompetence.
To my understanding, the only ISP now participating in the trial will be iiNet, as Optus has bowed out. I have been writing to iiNet asking them to bow out as well; their response is that they are doing the trial to show how it won’t work – I say that this is not sufficient reason to experiment with technology that can be used to limit our freedoms in the future. After all, what doesn’t work today due to perceived speed issues may not be a problem tomorrow, but the encroachment on our freedom remains a possibility.
I think it is time for pressure on iiNet. There is no legal reason for it to participate, there should be an economic reason presented to it as a reason not to.
The economic reason not to do this, is that that a huge number of -very- big US web companies have a coalition that was put together after the scandals in the USA (with the net and China and human rights). The idea in the coalition is to use ANY power in these companies hands to stop people from censoring the web. -ANY POWER-
Just how popular would Conroy or Rudd be if they tried this junk (not just as a political ploy to show the radical right that it cannot be done, but to really do it) and then one morning … all of the sudden our entire nation got V-E-R-Y hard to find on the web – starting with our no longer being listed on google, yahoo, etc (and with NO AUSSIE being able to access their google mail account anymore or use the US based search engines). That WOULD be the obvious first result of the coalition push around their weight.
Worse, the telecommunications giants – MUST have specialised routers and switches made only by a a few select companies, and all the biggies which do that manufacturing are now part of the coalition. They could quite literally shut down all Aussie access to web backbones in under a year. goodbye economy.