[AusNOG] Conroy announcement on filtering

[Mark Smith]

On Mon, 4 Jan 2010 16:11:58 +1030
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.
> 

I don't think there are any practical alternative proposals to what the
government is proposing. I think that is the ISPs position. As techs,
we know how hard this problem is to solve, or, alernatively, that it
isn't possible to solve at all, at the level the government is
convinced it is.

It seems to me that the majority of the public don't fundamentally
understand what the issue is - and I think that is because they don't
quite "understand" the Internet. It's some magic "cloud" that we techs
"sprinkle" our magic pixie dust on to make it work. Technology is
amazing to them, and as we work with it, we're amazing too, so surely
we're able to live up to the government's promises, we've just got to
work hard at it.

What I think needs to be done is to explain this issue in terms the
general public do understand, and I think to do that you need to "dumb"
it down, and not make it about just the Internet. I've been thinking a
bit about how you'd do that, and I think you need to explain it to
people using things that they do care about. I think a TV commercial
with scenes something like the following would do the trick:

- scene1: show a large hall full of people at desks, with truck loads of
  mail (i.e. snail mail) being delivered. Show the people at the desks
  opening up the mail, and then spreading gossip between themselves
  about who is writing what to whom. Possibly even better, show one of
  them then ask to be given some mail that is supposed to go to their
  neighbour, so they can get some gossip to tell the other neighbour
  over the fench

- scene2: similar to the above, for telephone calls

- scene3: similar to the above, for ATM withdrawls or credit card
  processing

- scene4: A voice over of something like "The government wants to ISPs
  to inspect everything you use your Internet connection for. It'd be
  easier to do it for your mail and your financial transactions. Will
  they stop at just trying to filter Internet?"



> > 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
>