In light of Conroy’s recent – unintentional – announcement that the internet cannot be regulated, and because I am bored, here are my views on censorship.

Personally I am against any form of censorship. Illegal material should be dealt with by police and the creators of the material jailed. And other, non-illegal material should be classified (where possible) so that people are informed about the content they are viewing. This means that the Refused Classification (RC) category would disappear. The non-illegal material that was previously part of the RC category would fall under a new classification, perhaps called “Unclassified” (UC). Distribution of this UC material would be allowed, but sales restricted and all other reasonable measures taken to ensure that it doesn’t fall into the hands of minors. This would return the Australian Classification Board’s (ACB) job to what it was originally intended to be: informing Australians of the type of content included in publications, movies, etc.

But wait, I hear someone crying out “isn’t all RC illegal?” This is one of the biggest problems I have with the DBCDE’s plan to censor the Internet. RC certainly does include horrible stuff like child pornography, bestiality and rape. What Conroy fails to mention is that it also includes information on controversial topics such as euthanasia and abortion. When questioned on this, Conroy said that the government does not make the decisions about what is RC and that the ACB is the body who determines the categories included, independently of the government. This. Is. A. Lie. The Australian Government decides on the categories and what those categories actually mean. The ACB merely makes decisions on particular items based on these guidelines. Guidelines determined by the Australian Government. For more information see: http://libertus.net/censor/clscensor.html#legbasis

With this in mind, I move on to the next topic: Is it possible to censor content? I do not believe this is the case any more. The Internet contains far more content than could ever be classified and contains digital copies of physical products, too. If, say, a book was Refused Classification in Australia, it is likely that anyone who wants to view that book would be able to find it on the Internet.

I hear you crying out again. (Who are you, anyway? ) “But the government has proposed mandatory Internet filtering that will block all RC material.” This is only a half-truth. The government has proposed a system whereby people who discover content that they believe to be RC can submit the URL to ACMA, who will then either send to the ACB to be classified or will attempt to guess what the ACB will say. If it comes out as RC, then the URL will be added to a blacklist. This blacklist will be sent to every ISP in the country, who will then block anyone who attempts to access these URLs. The problem is that it assumes 3 things: that RC material only exists at URLs, that the content at a specific URL will always remain the same, and that RC content is only available at a handful of URLs. All are incorrect assumptions.

1. RC material only exists at URLs:
   In case you don’t know, the data on the WWW is retrieved like this: Your computer sends a request to another computer (called a server) containing a URL. The server (which could be located anywhere in the world) sends back the content you requested. Under the government’s proposed ISP “filtering” scheme, your ISP would block your original request if the URL was on the blacklist, preventing you from getting the content. But the Internet is a lot bigger than just the World Wide Web (WWW). Approximately 60% of the traffic on the Internet is peer-to-peer (P2P), that is, it doesn’t involve URLs or servers, just computers like your desktop sending data to other computers. Because there are no URLs (or any other form of identifier that would indicate what data is being sent) for most P2P traffic, ISPs can’t block RC material sent via P2P.
2. Content at a specific URL will remain the same, always:
   This should be pretty obvious to anyone who has ever used the Internet. If you’ve ever been to a news site, you’ll know that the content on the homepage changes constantly. If a URL is added to the Government’s blacklist, it’s on there forever. There’s (currently) no way to appeal and not even any way to tell if a URL is blocked or not (the list is kept secret). This could be extremely damaging to sites where the content is user-generated. All it would take is one user to upload something that would be rated RC, and the page at that URL would be blocked indefinitely. Even if the site’s moderator’s took down the content afterwards, the URL would remain on the blacklist.
3. RC content is only available at a handful of URLs:
   The problem here is the sheer size of the WWW. Google recently estimated that the WWW contains over 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs, growing at a rate of over 1 Billion (1,000,000,000) per day. The Government plans for its blacklist to contain between 1,000 and 10,000 URLs with any more running into technical problems. To put that in comparison it’s less than 0.000001% of the WWW and less than 0.001% of the amount of content that is added EVERY DAY.

There are 2 conclusions to be had here: Either the Government’s plan will do NOTHING to combat the “problem” of RC content on the Internet, or the “problem” is so small that it is not really a problem at all. So if you are in support of mandatory ISP-level filtering censorship, or are on the fence, I suggest you take a good, hard look at the problem and work out whether it’s worth spending $40 million in taxpayer dollars plus tens of millions in increased ISP fees on.

If you want more information on the Government’s proposed “filtering” scheme I recommend: http://libertus.net/censor/ispfiltering-au-govplan.html