Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google's censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally.
When your communication minister is making reference to Chinese internet policy in a favorable context you know something's gone badly wrong somewhere.
You know what would be awesome?
If Google just shut down youtube for australia. Even for a day. (With a site explaining that the government wants to censor it).
I know it will never happen - but would be so awesome if it did.
I really like this idea, actually. Though even a splash page would probably be enough. If put in the right terms, I think the majority of people would cry shenanigans on their gov't, as many probably have no idea it's going on.
What's going on down there? There's been a burst of these sorts of stories lately.
I mean this seriously, since I live about 10,000 miles away; what's the story behind this burst of censorship lately? (A link is fine, but I don't have a clue what to even look for to get an answer.)
"What's going on down there? There's been a burst of these sorts of stories lately."
Nothing. There hasn't been a burst of censorship recently. As far as I'm aware, censorship laws have remain unchanged for quite some time. What's happened within the last year or two though is that through social media, Americans have become aware of the strict censorship laws that exist within Australia. Many of these people have mistakenly come to the conclusion that such censorship in Australia must be a recent development.
The truth is that if anything, censorship has become less severe. The video games that pass through the Classification Board today without a problem are far, far more violent than what used to require modification a decade ago.
In regards to Internet censorship, it seems consistent with the current legislation. If a government believes that it is the will of the people that extreme porn and violent video games be banned, then the legislation is ineffective if such material is easily accessible via the Internet.
"...I mean this seriously, since I live about 10,000 miles away; what's the story behind this burst of censorship lately? ..."
The censorship is not a new thing. I was watching of all things an old interview with Frank Zappa circa 1983 (Rage, ABCTV) ~ http://www.abc.net.au/tv/guide/netw/200705/programs/LE0630V0... and he was talking about his albums. Album after album was censored. Australia has always had this background level of censorship only now it's more visible.
When Amazon first launched some friends of mine were thrilled at how easy it was to order books that were on the banned books list. Four or so of them ordered PIHKAL.
They all got delivered, except for one. The last guy had a knock on his door and the rest of his order hand delivered by a customs/federal police officer/similar who advised that it probably wasn't smart to be ordering banned books from overseas. He wasn't prosecuted - it was a "we know where you live, bucko" kinda visit.
"... Four or so of them ordered PIHKAL.... They all got delivered, except for one. The last guy had a knock on his door and the rest of his order hand delivered by a customs/federal police officer/similar who advised that it probably wasn't smart to be ordering banned books from overseas ..."
Interesting. You can sort of understand the correlation between specific recipes for elicit drugs like amphetamines which are dangerous. I'd never thought about classes of information restricted that way. Nuclear physics is another I can think of. Whole slabs of nuclear theoretical physics have been removed from common knowledge. Another, military information of which Paladin Press is well known for.
The irony, the information in each of these areas are still mostly actively used, or at least only a locked up "instruction manual" away.
Conservatives don't get it that advancements in technology have the tendency to make censorship laws impracticable.
In this particular case, you friends can always order e-books, and in case your credit-card transactions are tracked, you can always find pirated versions and download them through an encrypted connection.
And what's ironic is that the censorship of a book makes it a lot more popular that it would've been otherwise.
What next? Plant a chip in every human being that triggers on certain patterns of the brain's electrical impulses? I'm pretty sure there's going to be a crack for that.
It's a few things. Both the communications minister and the PM are, despite being in the Labor Party, actually quite religious and conservative. There is a very strong wowser attitude from this government in particular which has resulted in increasing taxes on alcohol to discourage young drinking and various other forms of "nanny state" initiatives. We need to be protected from ourselves it seems.
Also, there is a single Australian senator (Steven Fielding) from a religious right party called Family First who holds the balance of power. His support is often required for the passage of government legislation, and the strong suspicion is that deals on things like internet censorship have been done behind the scenes.
Finally and most critically in my view, we have no enshrined right to freedom of speech or expression in our constitution and most Australians are too apathetic to demands these rights, and protest the government's actions.
"Also, there is a single senator ... who holds the balance of power."
This seems to be a serious design flaw in democracy. One person (or one small party), with the ability to swing the majority vote one way or another, ends up with a disproportionate amount of power.
We see this with the Quebec separatists in Canada, and in the US, with their "independent" senators.
It gets worse. Australia has a preferential voting system where you rank the candidates from first choice to last. It's not too bad a system if there's a small number of candidates, but the senate has dozens.
So the alternative to numbering every box (and what most people do for the senate), is to just put a "1" in the party of your choice. They then decide who the preferences go to. I'm not kidding.
In the case of Steven Fielding, the 2 major parties both gave him their "preferences" above each other, but neither of the major parties got enough votes to get the seat, so he got it. How many people actually voted for him as their preferred candidate? 56,376
In the US, campus speech codes against "hate speech" are often worse than this, and campuses overwhelmingly conform to left-leaning views. http://www.thefire.org/index.php
I have increasingly less confidence that democracy can deal with this issue.
Articles and that and others inevitably focus on pornography. Discussions end up going off to a side about whether or not kids or even adults should watch porn and what is going too far. All those things are completely irrelevant because they are talking about what should be filtered.
so the australian communications Minister Stephen Conroy has just set the democracy and freedom of speech and internet to chinese standards? this is sad. could someone just tell these peoples to wake up!
It obviously isn't to Chinese standards. China censors dissent and political opposition. The Australian Constitution protects freedom of political communication. Therefore, any laws that restrict the ability of residents to discuss and criticise political decisions and issues would be unconstitutional.
In regards to euthanasia, it is perfectly fine to discuss the philosophical and political arguments on each side. However, it is currently illegal to provide explicit how-to instructions on performing euthanasia. This has led to the disappointing decision to ban The Peaceful Pill Book, written by Australian euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke.
The proposed Internet filter will limit access to extreme porn, excessively violent material and instructions on how to commit crimes. It's regrettable that the government is even proposing such legislation, but it doesn't help anyone to make inaccurate comparisons to countries like China and Iran. A more sensible comparison would be to Denmark, which already has an operational internet filter.
My personal view is that it doesn't really matter what the intentions are now. It's a framework.
Before, no one could enforce restrictions on speech in Australia. It's not a question of laws or policies, it was physically impossible. You could send police to shut down a TV station, but not a website.
It obviously isn't to Chinese standards. China censors dissent and political opposition. The Australian Constitution protects freedom of political communication. ...it is perfectly fine to discuss the philosophical and political arguments on each side. However, it is currently illegal to provide explicit how-to instructions on performing euthanasia.
No, you're presupposing the answer. Specifically, you have already decided where the line is between political debate and illegal action.
But I claim that this isn't an inherent line. For example, it's impossible to fully debate euthanasia without understanding how it's done. Yet your assumption implicitly bars introduction of that material. And China makes the claim that pr0n is inherently destabilizing to the country -- the very same argument you're making against how-to on euthanasia.
I think people will make it a freedom-of-political-communication issue, because that's the obvious way of getting the law declared invalid, or declared not to apply to political speech or what-have-you.
There's no absolute freedom of political communication in Australia. Instead, there's a test of whether the law is appropriate and adapted to a legitimate purpose. It's not at all clear how internet censorship laws will fare under this test.
Quote: "Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google's censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally." Well , this sounds like referring to chinese standards to me, and it seems to just be a first step, they already imposed censorship on other stuff, not quite sure what it is exactly,a kind of blacklist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australi... so if you give these Guys the power to filter everything they don't want you to see, they will use it, google has a search engine and this search engine help peoples " find what they are looking for " so I think maybe they should figure out how to educate people to not look for some kind of content and not ask google to do that, and maybe some parents to do their homework with their kids looking for porn and other sensitive content.
I imagine Conroy was making the point that it was technically possible. I don't think that bringing up Chinese internet censorship was the most politically astute way to make that point, mind you...
The really stupid thing about this is that most of the kinds of material that Conroy makes a big deal about (child porn, fetish porn, etc) is already banned on Youtube. The kinds of things that they're asking Google to go the effort of filtering are videos about things like how to do graffiti, and information about euthanasia. Not really worth it, is it?
What kinds of videos do the Australians want Youtube to filter? I think this might be someone to score political points out of a minister misstatement. I suspect Youtube already does a good enough job filtering porn to satisfy the Australian government. It's not like the Australians want to start blocking words like "freedom" and "nirvana".
Conroy wasn't talking about YouTube specifically, but about Google and high-volume websites in general that currently aren't possible to filter through software. I'd be surprised if YouTube did contain material that the OFLC would consider Refused Classification.
Possibly. I wonder if a video game playthrough (say fallout 3) is RC? The US version of the game is, but is a video of said game (esp. as there's an R rating for video). Also - the crime instruction issue, might be something like that on youtube
There is only one worldwide version of Fallout 3; the Australian version is identical to the US copy. The item Morphine was renamed Med-X to pass through the Australian Classfication Board. The name change was also applied to all other international versions of the game.
A better example would be a game like L4D2. However that should be perfectly fine. Although video games lack an R18+ rating in Australia, such a rating exists for television and film. Therefore, a video of a RC computer game should be fine (as long as it is within the constraints of the R18+ rating for film).
I think it's unlikely that YouTube would a host a video on crime instruction that would be severe enough to be considered RC. I may be wrong. Perhaps someone could try uploading a euthanasia how-to video on YouTube describing explicitly the steps involved in performing euthanasia - the drugs required, how to obtain and smuggle such drugs through Australian customs, and the dosage required. I suspect that YouTube would probably take it down.
As unfair as China's censorship is, they can have it because they have a large enough market. Is Australia really large enough for Google to be that concerned about?
It's not fair. But then again, business isn't fair either.
China has over 60x the population of Australia but only 4x the GDP. Sounds like Australia is quite a honey pot relatively speaking. Especially when you consider YouTube ad revenue probably does better in Australia than in China.
Our current affairs programs such as 'Today Tonight' and 'A Current Affair' feed on stories like these, which only provide more fuel for newspapers, radio talk shows and even schools for discussion.
The general public here is still of the naive opinion that the internet is dangerous.
So lately I've been thinking, there seems to be a large push globally towards greater censorship on the web. At the moment it would seem as if the US has been immune, but it makes me consider the possibility that in the future it could come to us too. I had this idea of building a backup system for easily and covertly passing information around on the web using the existing infrastructure in order to bypass existing filtration systems. It seems really important that we should be prepared, just in case.
When your communication minister is making reference to Chinese internet policy in a favorable context you know something's gone badly wrong somewhere.