aaron552.syte.cc

In response to Mark Newton’s factual statement that the ACMA blacklist (the mandatory component of the government’s proposed ISP-level filter) will block legal content including:

• All R18+ and X18+ material that does not have a government-approved age-verification page (none of them have this, currently)
• MA15+ material that is used for commercial purposes
• All RC material (which is legal to own and view privately in most of Australia)

Jim Wallace’s response to this fact is that it is “utter nonsense”. Well Jim, I think you need to do a little more research. These four responses from Senator Stephen Conroy  prove that you are wrong and misleading the public, unlike Mark, who states the facts.

Not only that, but who gave you or the government the right to decide what is right for all children in Australia. Household values differ. In some houses, parents might not want their children to have access to internet chatrooms and social networking like facebook or myspace while other parents might be 100% happy to let their children access these types of sites. These sites are possibly harmful to children who ostensibly might run into online predators (a recent study shows that this risk is smaller than was thought by many) but the an ISP-level opt-out filter provides no flexibility to provide for differences in parental values. Surely you aren’t suggesting that your own conservative christian values are the only values that parents have, or worse that those should be the only values that parents should have.

As an adult, I am becoming more and more worried about the future of our internet. If, according the the above blacklist, MA15+ content used for commercial purposes is blocked, does that mean that subscription-based online games such as Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings online, etc. will be blocked? While on the topic of online games I would like to restate that anything (such as a filtercensor) that increases australia’s internet latency is completely unacceptable to me as a gamer. Finally, the mandatory filter is not there to protect children, it is there to prevent access to “prohibited” content. At this task it fails dismally: it can be bypassed in less than 10 minutes by anyone with even a slight understanding of the internet and it doesn’t block the major source of “prohibited” content: peer-to-peer. If my opinion (and the opinion of the majority of internet users) matters at all, scrap the mandatory blacklist. It fails at its task, it cannot succeed. So why have it at all?