Australia to Censor the World Wide Web

Wow. If you are going to announce a new policy that is mirrored on that of the commu­nist govern­ment in China, New Year’s Eve is prob­a­bly a good day to do it as no one is paying atten­tion to the media and they’ll be too hung over on the 1st of Janu­ary to read the newspaper.

Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Minis­ter Stephen Conroy says new measures are being put in place to provide greater protec­tion to chil­dren from online pornog­ra­phy and violent websites.

Sena­tor Conroy says it will be manda­tory for all inter­net service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filter­ing, to houses and schools that are free of pornog­ra­phy and inap­pro­pri­ate material.

“Labor makes no apolo­gies to those that argue that any regu­la­tion of the inter­net is like going down the Chinese road,” he said.

This is a signif­i­cant move and one that is achiev­able from a tech­nol­ogy point of view, but very diffi­cult to admin­is­ter and main­tain I would imag­ine. No one is going to object to trying to filter out child pornog­ra­phy (well some disturb­ing people maybe), however, once this plat­form is in place, and depend­ing on how the legis­la­tion is drafted, it could be up to some civil servant some­where in Canberra to decide what else they deem “inap­pro­pri­ate mate­r­ial”. Perhaps blogs from Australian soldiers serv­ing over­seas are glori­fy­ing war and so are not deem appropriate.

I think that the quote about making no apolo­gies for follow­ing the lead from China is inter­est­ing. This is a Labour govern­ment that seems unashamedly left-wing, in a world where Labour parties seem to want to play down their histor­i­cal links to trade unions and communism.

Related Links

• Conroy announces manda­tory inter­net filters to protect children
• Australia Joins China In Censor­ing The Internet