[AusNOG] Conroy announcement on filtering

[Rhodry Korb]

Does anyone know where the government has posted how they will decide RC
content, what currently constitutes RC content, who will decide what gets
blocked, how will we know it has been blocked, and how can a citizen object
to the blocking of a site (as it may not REALLY be RC content)

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Mark Newton <newton at internode.com.au> wrote:

>
> On 04/01/2010, at 3:40 PM, Skeeve Stevens wrote:
>
> If I was the government, I would basically offer $$$ (or a tax break, or
> something) to ISPs who chose to join a filtering programme or offered
> products based on some sort of filtering standard.
>
>
> SAGE-AU suggested something along those lines over a year ago, it fell
> on deaf ears.
>
> Note that the Internet industry itself has been totally deficient in coming
> up
> with (or endorsing) alternative proposals.  Most of the big ISPs haven't
> been
> able to get out of their way quickly enough to make public statements about
> how
> they applaud the Government's efforts in this area, and the small ISPs
> have
> barely said anything at all.  Disappointing, but completely expected.
>
> If users are really screaming for this, surely they would just go and
> connect to an ISP who is offering the filtering solution.
> If there were really a massive demand for this, wouldn’t someone have
> developed their own product by now and selling tons of it?
>
>
> Webshield has existed for years.  They have about 3500 customers,
> nation-wide.
>
> So there's your anticipated market size.  Customer demand is virtually
> zero, so
> nobody should be surprised by any disinterest shown by developers in this
> space.
>
>  Or.. is this just the government not trusting people to be adults and
> responsible – and assuming that there are paedophiles everywhere.
>
>
> We'll see this in a number of issues that come down the pike in the next
> few years:
>
> The ALP left and the ALP right generally have more or less consistent
> visions
> for how they expect society to work.  But they take very different paths
> to
> implement that vision.
>
> In general terms, the left take the view that if they elucidate a
> compelling vision
> and use Government to provide incentives to empower people to achieve it,
> most people will, out of their own good graces, pick up the incentives and
> play
> along.
>
> Also in general terms, the right take the view that society is too dumb,
> unimaginative and riven with special interests to behave like that, so they
> use
> the Government to set rules which penalize failure to attain the vision.
>
> The right is currently in charge.  The online censorship policy is the
> right's
> way of implementing their desire to facilitate a "civil and confident
> society."
> They do this by making sure that anything uncivil is criminalized, rather
> than
> by supporting civility and encouraging confidence among the Australian
> population (and they also ignore ACMA's research which shows that
> Australians are civil and confident online already)
>
> We'll see this story repeat when copyright comes up:  The progressive
> way of dealing with copyright is to provide incentives for artists so that
> creativity can continue to flourish while the
> business/marketing/promotional
> side of creative industries flounders until they sort out their new
> business
> models.  The conservative way of dealing with copyright is to slowly
> screw-down the restrictions and amp-up the penalties so that behaving in
> a way which doesn't support existing copyright business models becomes
> increasingly illegal and risky.  The right wingers are in charge, so we're
> going to get the conservative approach -- for all the same reasons that
> they're trying to implement censorship.  The ideology is the same, the
> effects will be the same too.
>
> In short, the left behaves as if laws are supposed to support and encourage
> "good" behaviours;  The right behaves as if people will change "bad"
> behaviours in response to laws.  Are the citizens controlling the
> Government,
> or is the Government controlling the citizens?  As the "V for Vendetta"
> tagline
> said, "People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should
> be afraid of the people."
>
> While the right is currently ascendent, history will show that their
> approach
> is wrong, and that the laws they pass won't be worth jack ten years from
> now, that their implementation will oscillate between catastrophic and
> hilariously incompetent, and that the only tangible outcome they'll achieve
> is to burn long-term goodwill.
>
> But we citizens are going to go through a lot of pain as we collectively
> teach
> them that lesson.  And because the right is such a bunch of control
> freaks who neither know nor care what they're doing, the ISP industry is
> going to bear much of the brunt of it too.
>
> That's why I think the industry's continual efforts to appease the
> Government
> are misplaced.  The Government isn't even remotely interested in dealing
> with ISPs in good faith.  Conroy treats the ISP industry with total
> contempt
> right now, how could it possibly be any worse if the industry was actively
> opposing what he's doing?
>
>   - mark
>
>
> --
> Mark Newton                               Email:  newton at internode.com.au(W)
> Network Engineer                          Email:  newton at atdot.dotat.org (H)
> Internode Pty Ltd                         Desk:   +61-8-82282999
> "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton"  Mobile: +61-416-202-223
>
>
>
>
>
>
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