[AusNOG] Conroy announcement on filtering

[Peter Adkins]

My guess would be that it will fall into the OFLC's ballpark.
Although, there is still not yet a classification scheme or
"breakdown" that has been publish as yet I don't believe...

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Rhodry Korb <rhodrykorbdomain at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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