Still waiting for you to address, as you said you would, the arguments presented here:

http://www.kadaitcha.com/2008/12/12/on-observers-observations/

and in comments here:

http://www.kadaitcha.com/2008/12/11/minister-for-digital-obstruction/

Cheers

Jin

I want to correct your assertion that “potentially prohibited content” is not proposed to be blocked.

ACMA does not refer *any* offshore content to the Classification Board for review. The only time they involve the Classification Board is when they’re about to deliver an enforceable Takedown Notice on an Internet Content Host inside Australia.

So the complete list of offshort URLs which mandatory filtering is supposed to address is “Potentially Prohibited Content”.

As Sch 7 Section 21 of the Broadcasting Services Act defines it, “potential prohibited content” is content which has not been examined by the Classification Board, but, in the opinion of ACMA, “would be” prohibited content if it was ever formally assessed.

Make no mistake, that’s *exactly* the content which mandatory filtering is going to attack.

– mark

For content hosted overseas, the ACMA has two ways of banning it: They can either send it off to the Classification Board and use the results to determine its status (section 20 – “Prohibited Content”), or they can take a guess about what the classification board would say if they were asked (section 21 – “Potential Prohibited Content”).

For overseas content, the treatment of “prohibited” and “potential prohibited” is identical under the law, with the one exception being that decisions of the Classification Board delivered under section 20 can theoretically be appealed to the Classification Review Board, something that isn’t possible under section 21.

There’s no requirement at all for ACMA to submit overseas content to the Classification Board. They do the whole thing in-house.
——————————————————————–

1. “and that the content is prohibited or potential prohibited content.“
It is either/or: Potential prohibited content is not automatically blocked in the proposed mandatory filtering.
2. This is reaching a bit far to assume that the opt-in handling of content by ACMA today translates directly into mandatory blacklisting in the foreseen system.

Thus the question is perhaps not hitting the nail on the head, but does raise the requirement for clarification from ACMA, exactly what the process will be for sites or individual webpages to land on the ACMA blacklist for mandatory filtering.

There is great concern expressed by many bloggers in many forums that webpages can far too easily be categorised onto the ACMA blacklist in the future system. Let’s find out just how that is going to happen before making too many assumptions?
Thanks

Mike

| Disclosure: I am currently contracted to a vendor of ISP-filtering solutions whose products are being evaluated as part of the
| current ACMA trials.