Australian Internet Filter Enters Trial Phase

blake writes "News.com.au reports "The Government's plan to have internet service providers filter pornography and other internet content deemed inappropriate for children is going full-steam ahead. [...] The trial will evaluate ISP-level internet content filters in a controlled environment while filtering content inappropriate for children." It all sounds in good taste, and we are told that you will be able to opt out at any time, but will putting this filter in place simply give the powers that be the ability to block access to content for their own agendas. Censorship may be necessary, but should it be overseen by Government."

It's amazing

[Loibisch]

It's amazing what potentially very dangerous tech people will tolerate just so they can "protect their kids".
Never mind that there's a million porn sites, the possibility of encrypted traffic or that there's the possibility that someone might use this to filter government-unfriendly information from your data stream...no, don't mind all that, just think of the children. Everything is fine.

Re:Censorship Is Never Necessary

[KublaiKhan]

Censorship -within an individual residence- is potentially helpful in certain situations--young children and the like, when the parents want to ensure less chance of unfortunate images showing up and suchlike.

At any larger scope than a single family, though, yes, it's entirely unnecessary and should be discouraged whenever possible.

Re:Hmmm...

[apdyck]

I already have a nice filter installed. It's called me not letting them use the PC without my being within eyesight of the PC

This is the approach that my parents took for many years (we were early adopters of the Internet, and as such parental controls were unheard of). It was remarkably effective. They even kept the computer that had the modem in a room with a locked door, so that we had to get them to unlock the door if we wanted to use the computer. There was another 'public' computer that wasn't online that we could use at any time, but if we needed to go online, it had to be done in the study under the supervision of one or more parent.

Re:No, no, a thousand times no.

[sconeu]

Has anyone suggested the possibility of adding a .xxx domain suffix?

IMO, the *real* issue of .xxx is not the one that the us.gov has (OMG, it approve5 pr0n!!!!), but rather, *WHO* decides what "must" go in .xxx.

You? Me? Bush? The Saudis? The Taliban? What about the ACLU? Or the gov.au, or maybe gov.fr?

Re:Simpler solution

[JesseMcDonald]

Forget the "child abuse" label. Hitting someone is assault, whether the person you're hitting is an adult or a child, and regardless of whether the child is yours or someone else's. It should be treated as such.

On the other hand, the parents should have some leverage as well. I propose that they not be legally obligated to provide shelter or care; any child that habitually breaks the rules can find its own food and shelter. To protect against overuse, relax the rules giving preferential treatment to biological parents in regards to custody and let others take in the child voluntarily with a minimum of trouble. Then the problem cases can discover first-hand the consequences of alienating their caretakers, and uncaring parents can learn to treat their children as human beings instead of personal property. This should cultivate a much larger degree of respect on both sides.

Get the kids out, stay off my lawn

[Zashi]

Forgive me for piggy backing on a troll's frist psot, but, who the FUCK said the internet was meant for children? Why does it have to be kid friendly? Protective parents don't let their kids hangout and befriend strangers (adults or otherwise) unsupervised. Why should exploring the internet be any different? Just because a company attempts to target or exploit a demographic through some medium doesn't mean the medium needs to be sanitized for that demographic.

Ahh.. internet censorship, hell, censorship in general... such a pet peeve of mine.

Any actual evidence of harm?

[nasor]

Has anyone ever actually demonstrated that looking at porn is harmful to children/teens? Everyone seems to be taking it as a forgone conclusion, but I've never seen any scientific evidence in a psychology journal. If looking at porn is really as dangerous as many people like to believe, it should be very easy to demonstrate the harm - but so far as I know, nobody has ever done that.

And no, I don't consider "It gives people unrealistic ideas about sex" to be actual harm. Romance movies probably do vastly more harm to developing adolescents by giving them unrealistic expectations of what real romantic relationships are like. Having a grossly distorted "Hollywood" view of romance is probably going to be substantially more problematic to a teenager/young adult than being disappointed that your girlfriend doesn't want to do something kinky that you saw in a porn movie.

It seems like the government should have to produce some evidence that it's actual dangerous before they ban/censor it.

Re:Simpler solution

[Rakishi]

Ah yes the lovely straw man argument. Let me follow up on it: since you consider children the same as adults I guess they'll be fine if we just dump them out on the street. If you disagree then you're a hypocrite, since I'm simply using the same logic as you are using. After all you're not required to support a dead beat relative so why should you be forced to support a dead beat child, either they work or they don't eat.

Anyway, children are not adults and they don't think quite as adults. Sometimes you need to hit them a bit to get the point across since you can't exactly argue with them logically.

Re:Wrong reason

[poetmatt]

I don't mean this as an attack on you, but I respectfully disagree. The internet is not capable of being regulated, and that is a fact that is scary to people. You cannot stop a global entity anymore than you can find a person within a corporate entity liable for anything. Intangible things are not capable of physical control aspects, from a basic sense. You could see the internet more easily thought of as an "idea". You can't "stop" an idea. Even try, and there are other ways to equivalently provide the same.

People may not like that viruses are out there, that child molesters are out there, that malicious websites, scams, everything. Danger! (sarcasm) Many of these are over-hyped and overexaggerated to fit same politicians agenda. Has that ever stopped the news, the media, the public at large from anything whatsoever? Last I checked, not since civilization existed. You can kill someone but that won't take back or take away or control the things that person has already said. Trying to control the internet is like trying to on a wholely theoretical level go back in time, you can't (at least until someone comes up with a way for time travel). No matter what you do, you can never control someone's free will, even with physical imprisonment. Maybe I could set up my own ethernet hub, maybe include some wireless, some wired, a mesh of its own, that only the people of my choosing can connect to? I believe people call them darknets [wikipedia.org], but what it could really end up being with a large enough community, is just its own internet (aka form another internet). There are ways to use other DNS providers, pipeines, etc, that go beyond any level of control or regulation.

Rant off. Problem is, comcast is acting within the law. There is a deeper issue here than what is legal, or regulated. Dancing around the law is a big issue right now in every country. What would really set off an enormous fiasco is if a law was passed that was basically "you must follow the intent of the law, not just the letter", but I think no country is ready for such a debate (plus it'd be immeasurably hard to balance). Were that to happen, I think that would be a solution (plus it would provide a forum for debate/invalidating of laws that have those two ideals too far from eachother).

Essentially, we have far more things to fix that are more core to this issue than to try to head towards finding a goal involving censorship or filtering. External problem, meet internal/structural/underlying problem.

I'll believe in accountable governements

[Hucko]

when Dear Mr J Howard is brought before a criminal case for his lack of duty of care in placing Australian soldiers in a position of defending another nation's political ideology. When he and his colleagues are successfully sued for introducing a industrial relations that left some/many Australian citizens worse off in a period of time when corporations were experiencing a economic boom.

The only thing he was truly held accountable for is claiming that Australian citizens had never been better off.

Re:Wrong reason

[ozmanjusri]

What would really set off an enormous fiasco is if a law was passed that was basically "you must follow the intent of the law, not just the letter", but I think no country is ready for such a debate (plus it'd be immeasurably hard to balance).

Actually, laws like that have been used successfully in Australia for OHS.

Before the current laws were introduced, workplace safety was based around the same proscriptive model most statute laws still have. Basically, they were a list of things you either had to do or couldn't do. Whenever there was a serious accident, statutes forbidding whatever caused the accident were enacted, ad infinitum.

This resulted in a climate of dependence on state regulation and because the nature of workplaces changed rapidly throughout the 50's to 70's, didn't reduce accidents much. Companies, and the mining industry in particular, continued to kill a large number of employees every year. They were frequently in full compliance with statute laws when they did so, because the laws hadn't caught up with technology.

The British Robens Report in 1972 changed that. Since then, Australian OSH laws have moved towards a set of general duties, where employers have a duty to assess risks and provide a safe workplace, and employees have similar duties to themselves and their workmates. There's a good description here [anu.edu.au], including a link to the original report.

That change has been very successful, and I believe a similar model could be adopted for internet regulation, where service providers (ISPs) would have a set of duties to their users, including provision of a "clean" feed if that customer requires it.

It's a more flexible approach which would allow competition amongst ISPs to reduce costs to customers.