Australia Ranked Fourth In Internet Freedom 221
mjwx writes "A report published by Freedom House has placed Australia in fourth in Internet Freedom, below Estonia, the United States and Germany. Freedom House highlights the lack of actual censorship in Australia pointing out that the highly unpopular proposed ISP level censorship has been shelved since the 2010 Australian election. The Freedom House report is available here."
Below Germany? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Below Germany? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure Germany filters out anything mentioning that party that was real big in Germany a few generations back..
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I hear it heils from another epoch.
HAR HAR HAR see what I did thar?
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No.
That's a pretty stupid statement. If you want to look to active denial of past activities, look to Japan.
BTW, how's the native population doing in the States?
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From my experience the Germans are largely not in denial at all, but are rather overly apologetic for and vehemently opposed to the 'nazi' idea. This serious opposition is probably why the OP might be talking about filtering 'nazi' web media. I don't know if it is true, but from my experience, denial wouldn't be the reasoning for it.
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Of course Germany has to appear apologetic otherwise it would have consequences. When you enter the country however and stay a while you will find out it's only what they want people to believe.
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A significant majority of the German population were members of the Nazi party. This is why the denazification program after Germany's surrender had a lot of problems. You couldn't find enough people who weren't a member of the Nazi party who was competent enough to operate the jobs that were supposed to be denazified. This lead to pretty much every military governor looking the other way on the policy because they knew they couldn't enforce it.
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So nowadays most extremists are left-wing and at the same time it's fashionable to be a right-wing extremist? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
In reality, political parties of what is commonly referred to as the extreme right and the extreme left get very low results in Germany, both absolutely and when compared to our neighbours. The extreme right -- while a very worrying movement -- is basically a non-starter politically, a few municipalities in depopulated East Germany nonwithstanding. The extreme left on
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Well Sarrazin told the truth about Germany, its social policies, and the deterioration of the working class by the pockets of religious authoritarians that were supported by taxpayers but seek privileges for themselves.
This was an indictment of the socialists and their policies, so of course they have to call him "extremist". They do that to pretty much anyone that points out the destructive nature of socialism.
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Well, he is extremely stupid, if nothing else. Just like a lot of Germans! No wonder those people think he's the bee's knees.
Re:Below Germany? (Score:4, Insightful)
It wasn't a stupid statement, it was a poorly worded statement.
Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany. So are swastikas, and pretty much anything related to the nazis outside of "bad things, very bad things, happened in the early half of the 20th century". I'm exaggerating but this is fucking slashdot and only a mindless pedant would misinterpret me as badly as you have.
The fact is Germany *does* censor their internet, and the content they remove *is* related to that party that was pretty big a few generations back. In other words, what I said is accurate, just not very precise -- I didn't expect, but should have I suppose, that some asshole would come by and think I was making claims that are so obviously not fucking true that even an idiot would understand that that wasn't what I was saying. Censorship is not denialism, censorship is simply not allowing certain things to be said or seen; Germany engages in censorship, regardless of whether or not the things they censor are things that any decent person would think shouldn't be said or heard. That doesn't make it magically become not-censorship.
Blow Germany? (Score:2)
Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well. Not necessarily in GMB, but 'the west' never fully divested itself of the ideas; even after the NAZIs gave us a front row seat in how badly these things can go.
In Canada - I'm from - we have a leading political party that is as much at home with the eugenics ideals as the Tea Party is in the US. Most European nations have some political movement that is only a scratch or two away from this nonsense. They are singing to a choir, and
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Interestingly, one only has to look at the origins of marriage counselling (e.g. Paul Popenoe, Robert Dickinson) and Planned Parenthood (Margaret Sanger, Abraham & Hannah Stone, etc) in the US to see the connection...
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I've not heard of the Stones, but I gather Sanger was interested in contraception more as a t
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Most genetic diseases are recessive, so just advising people developing those diseases not to breed would not eliminate them at all - they still will be inherited, and only come to light when two people having the disease interbreed. To actually eliminate them you have to test all people for those diseases and then recommend to all the people carrying the right allele not to breed - but because everyone of us carries some defective alleles, no one would allowed to breed at all.
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You wouldn't have to test all people - just those who have a genetic relationship to someone who has previously developed the disease, as those will be the potential carriers of a defective allelle. It wouldn't be practical to do this for every single less-than-optimal allelle, but it could be used to eliminate from the population those which are potentially most serious. Huntington's comes to mind. Cystic fibrosis. Haemophilia. Conditions that can be fat
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Annoying, really. Eugenics really had some potential for doing good - just a matter of convincing those with genetic diseases to not breed, and in a few generations they could be almost eliminated.
But how do you convince non Aryan people to refrain from breeding?
Seriously though I've spoken to someone, a regular user of another forum I frequent, who took the movie Idiocracy seriously, thought he was smart and understood evolution, that smart genes (i.e. his genes, hah) deserved to be artificially selected for and that road signs should be removed so there could be more "cleansing".
People are just too ignorant and selfish for eugenics to do good.
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You cannot be forced to sign a legally-binding document, and a document which you were forced to sign cannot be legally binding.
Re:Blow Germany? (Score:4, Interesting)
Free speech? Good idea. Freedom of religion? Good idea. Freedom of movement? Good idea. Free press? Good idea. A few obvious limitations of course, to prevent one person's use of their freedom from infringing upon the freedom of another, but in general good ideas. Freedom to pop out another human even if you are using known flawed genetic material, do not have the money to properly raise it or have a history of violence or mental illness? Not such a good idea.
Look at it more like this: There are laws for adoption. Certain conditions which disqualify someone. Some criminal offences, mental illness, things which have been deemed by those elected to write laws to render a person unfit to be a perent. So we already recognise, in law, and with very little contriversy, that some people just are not fit to raise children. And yet if they can manage to get knocked up themselves - which is not a difficult task - they somehow have a right to go ahead anyway? That just doesn't make sense. If you can't meet some minimum standard of parenting, you shouldn't be entrusted with that type of responsibility.
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"Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well. Not necessarily in GMB, but 'the west' never fully divested itself of the ideas; even after the NAZIs gave us a front row seat in how badly these things can go."
That is probably because Eugenics itself is solidly based in science. Eugenics is practiced indiscriminately and with great consistent and proven success across the board in animal breeding practices. This is most easily seen in dog breeds because canine genetics are among the
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Race shouldn't really factor into it, except for a few genetic things like sickle-cell anemia that correlate strongly. Even then you can start ignoring race as soon as you have proper genetic tests available.
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Nazi Germany is a lesson in how things go badly, not necessarily all those things being bad. Democracy was corrupted in Germany to become fascism and then Nazism and that does not make democracy bad. Eugenics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics [wikipedia.org] certainly went bad when it shifted from promoting sound social reproductive principles to executions of politically undesirables.
A licence to reproduce and be responsible for bringing up children in a world 6.91 billion, really honestly doesn't seem all that unr
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Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well.
Yawn. The opposite ideology, the equally wrong "Social Constructionism" dominates. So... were are these eugenicis scuttling around then?
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Eugenics, and a few of its kindred cousins, however are alive and well.
This is almost certainly one of a long list of social constructionist canards. There are probably a few eugenicists around; however, modern genetic research focuses on the dialogue between genes and environment.
The biological basis of behaviour is well established (See Turkheimer 2000 for a summary), and after 100 yrs of social science, there is no theory that predicts behaviour from social forces. (Things like attachment theory, and the media effects of violence/gender have no empirical backing -- see
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In Canada - I'm from - we have a leading political party that is as much at home with the eugenics ideals as the Tea Party is in the US.
The Tea Party isn't at home with eugenics ideals at all. Most Tea Partiers are pro-life. For a good example of this, see Sarah Palin, whose child has Down Syndrome, and, rather than aborting him, she had her child.
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BTW, how's the native population doing in the States?
They are still being kept in poverty by government dependency and the restrictions on any individual from owning land. That's what collectivism and lack of private property rights does to a people, unfortunately. The native population were pushed out of good land many generations ago, and putting them on "reservations" meant they were not allowed to participate in the prosperity that resulted from all that land being given to individuals to develop.
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Freedom House is heavily funded by the US gov't (Score:3, Informative)
Of course they're going to make sure the US gets near the top.
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Re:Freedom House is heavily funded by the US gov't (Score:4, Interesting)
I noticed that as well. Canada, the Netherlands and all Nordic countries are absent from the report. In their place a semi-nordic east-european country becomes the most free. I guess it would look too bad if there was 10 countries above the US, so they left out everybody above estonia.
I would really have like to hear to position of France and Spain also though.
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Exactly, this report is stunningly useless. Most of Europe is missing, including all the freedom-loving nations of the north (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland). How about Switzerland? Austria? France? (maybe not a good example :-), Spain? Holland? Belgium?, Luxemburg?.. comon... Europe is only represented by Germany, Italy (Berlusconi helooo) and the UK (and yes Georgia and Russia...)
No let's see how the internet freedom state is in Venezuela. I'm sure the US can beat that!
Re:stunningly useless (and more) (Score:3)
Let's go further.
This report is actively dangerous, in a sort of flamebait FUD way.
Let's just do one example - how about Sweden, (former?) home of the Pirate Bay and the Party thereon, and key pawn in the coercion attempt against, wait for it, Australian Julian Assange from the UK led by the US?
Oh wait!
Those three countries get slots 2, 4, and 5 and Sweden is ... uh... censored?
Re:Freedom House is heavily funded by the US gov't (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that the US, in retaining control of ICANN, demolishing network neutrality, placing excessive restrictions on cryptography, pressuring organizations to drop any association whatsoever with wikileaks and encouraging Internet fraud through a lack of any kind of privacy legislation, has effectively crippled actual freedom without needing any censorship legislation per-se, it should be obvious that the US is only near the top for reasons that have nothing to do with freedom.
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I was quite dissapointed by Canada's lack of inclusion. As a Canadian I would have found it particularly useful to provide a comparison against other countries. The US score seemed irrationally low which makes me think that Canada would be somewhere equivalent to Estonia, maybe with a small penalty for the challenges we are facing providing rural internet access.
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The list isn't intended to compare freedom between different western nations. Too few of those are included in the survey. All it does is point out that western nations are more free than non-western ones. Big surprise there, I'm sure.
On any complete list, I doubt most of the top-4 of this list would even make the top-10.
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Given that the US, in retaining control of ICANN,
That, IMO as a non-american is a very good thing.
The US have been going a bit overboard with copyright based domain seizures recently. However, the US is probably the country with the strongest free speech provisions in the entire world. So, they might not be perfect, but I cannot think of another country I would trust to do a better job. I certainly would not trust my own.
So, let's compare it to another "free country". Let's say he was here (UK). The UK gove
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Let's say he was here (UK)
Er he was here, of course. It's just that he didn't leak tons of British intelligence.
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Let's say he was here (UK). They could throw him in gaol and shutter the website for violating the official secrets act.
Yes, but I think your faith in the US is unfounded. If Mr. Wikileaks ever set foot on U.S. soil he would be in for one helluva bad time.
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Yes, but I think your faith in the US is unfounded.
You are mistaken. I don't have faith in the US, rather I was pointing out the flaws in the GP who seems to have faith in everyone BUT the US. I'm merely pointing out that everyone else is pretty much at least as bad.
There is no good, only bad and worse. Is the US the least bad of the bunch? I don't know, but I suspect that it may be.
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"Spycatcher" leaked far more of intelligence value to hostile nations than Wikileaks ever has. Don't recall any special renditioning going on there. Sure, the British Government took him to Australian court, but they were the ones who got their knuckles rapped for being economical with the truth. Much the same would have happened in a British court. In the US legal system, truthiness is the de-facto standard.
Don't recall any of the SAS autobiographies, which leaked special ops and black ops secrets, leading
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No, for the same reason that secret ballots in elections don't go against democratic freedoms but are actually critical in those freedoms existing in the first place. There would be no democratic freedom if how you voted was information that could be bought and sold on the open markets and used against you, agreed? Then you have accepted that freedom cannot exist without privacy. (Nor can privacy exist without freedom, as a lack of freedom requires you to accept whatever privacy abuses you are forced to end
Re:Below Germany? (Score:5, Informative)
As of now, there are two websites (Stormfront [wikipedia.org] and NSDAP/AO [wikipedia.org]) that are being filtered at several smaller ISPs in North Rhine-Westphalia. What you might heard of is that there is a controversial law that allows the German federal police to add alleged child pornography websites to a secret mandatory filtering list. However, this law has never been applied and will be repealed soon. In other news, most of Germany's states seem to push for web filtering of illegal gambling, but I doubt that this is going to happen in the end.
Re:Below Germany? (Score:5, Informative)
For what it's worth:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Germany [wikipedia.org]
and:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_by_country [wikipedia.org]
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oh c'mon dude.. ICE domain seizures are one thing..but nothing like the wholesale filtering in China or the Middle East.
blocking specific domains is relatively tame..and in the case of ICE can be blamed on simply not understaing how the tubes are hooked up - it's like blocking a sewer main in the street because one toilet is fucked up.
Re:Below Germany? (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree with them that the US probably is fairly good in comparison to much of the world, the major flaw I see in the Freedomhouse report is that it seems to treat the spirit of the law as being more relevant than the actual application and only considers governmental action rather than corporate activities (enabled by a bought and paid for legislative branch) that reduce freedom. Beyond ICE domain seizures, we have rampant DMCA abuse, government subsidized regional monopolies creating poor service and removing competition, extensive (though largely concealed) monitoring, attempted violations of net neutrality, traffic 'shaping' that is not required for its stated purpose, extensive abuse of the legal system to suppress unpopular or offensive speech of individuals or small business' unable to afford the expense of defending themselves, aging internet infrastructure the monopolies are making minimal efforts to upgrade except in the most profitable areas, and undoubtably more that don't come immediately to mind.
The US is taking baby steps towards a less free internet and by ranking them so highly without comment on the glaring problems in the system they are enabling it by creating a false impression that this is acceptable.
Also I find the mention of the US tech innovation particularly funny given that those companies all insist that they are primarily based out of Dublin, Ireland which is why they don't have to pay their fair share of taxes.
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And really, as for 'fair share of taxes,' have you ever met anyone who tries to pay more in taxes than they are absolutely re
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I'd like to see companies pay taxes where they actually operate and where they have the employees doing the work to generate the revenues rather than being able to shop around and choose to pretend their income comes from whichever country happens to have the most favourable tax climate that day. On the other hand I'm not a big fan of globalization as it is practiced and think the fact that tariffs are defacto illegal is a tragedy, so perhaps I'm not the person to look to.
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The entire top 4 is weird. Australia is also well known for its censorship. The US certainly has some issues. These countries are at the top simply because the list only examined a handful of countries. Most of Europe has not been examined at all. Had it been, I'm sure Iceland and similar countries would have topped the list.
All that this list is saying is that some random countries in Europe and North America are better than some random countries in Africa, Asia or South America. I'm sure nobody here is su
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Australia is also well known for its censorship.
...by those who know nothing about Australia.
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For Internet? Sure.. for movies and video games? Yep, censorship is the official policy with no apologies. Adults are not permitted to decide what they wish to watch, that's the decision of the state.
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Hmmm, I think the filtering was limited to mostly child porn and other *really* illegal stuff. Haven't noticed anything else in the past ten years, and there wasn't ever anything in the news about this type of thing either.
Do you have any info to back up that statement? Genuinely interested here...
Re:Below Germany? (Score:5, Insightful)
Relative to what?
Can you tell me, precisely, what bad things Sweden, Denmark, New Zealand or the Falkland Islands are doing that compare with intimidation and threats against companies that had links to Wikileaks?
Can you tell me, precisely, how many domain seizures the UK has been involved in of late?
Do you have any concrete examples of, oh, Lichtenstein ordering other nations to arrest minors and terrorize them for pissing off the MPAA?
Can you name any country other than the US which forbids the distribution of World War I audio for copyright reasons?
Inquiring lolcats wish to know.
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Can you name any country other than the US which forbids the distribution of World War I audio for copyright reasons?
Isn't that the law of the entire European Union under the Copyright Duration Directive [wikipedia.org]? WWI ended about 90 years ago, so my reading is that if the creators of the audio survived another 20 years after they made it, then it is still under copyright protection even today.
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No, because they are not featured in the report. Austrialia, Germany, US and Estonia are the four best among countries actually examined. Very few countries were examined and all the traditionally most free are strangely absent.
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the traditionally most free
Which are those then?
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an you tell me, precisely, what bad things Sweden, ... doing that compare with intimidation and threats against companies that had links to Wikileaks?
Sweden, right?
Sweden.
an you tell me, precisely, how many domain seizures the UK has been involved in of late?
You know that the IWF effectively filters THE ENTIRE INTERNET with absoloutely no oversight whatsoever, right?
Do you have any concrete examples of, oh, Lichtenstein ordering other nations to arrest minors and terrorize them for pissing off the MPAA?
So
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the size of the country also has some consideration
sweden and uk are of course sizable countries, but falklands? lichtenstein? really? don't you see how including tiny countries weaken your argument? the usa might have a multivolume policy on internet rights and thousands working in the field. while the falkland island has the harbor master's teenage son running the entire country's internet, and the internet policy is whomever he disconnects for whatever reason
so where's pitcairn island and aaland island?
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estonia?
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I have no problem with the omission of the Falklands or Liechtenstein from the list. But why is France not on the list? What about Sweden, Denmark, Netherland? It's a very arbitrary list, and doesn't say anything whatsoever about the relative internet freedom between western countries. All it says is that western countries are more free than non-western countries, but I don't think anyone is really surprised by that.
This incomplete list is completely non-news, unless anyone is actually surprised that the US
sweden is 10 million people (Score:2)
compare to falklands (3,000 people) or lichtenstein (35,000)
estonia is over a million
the point is,somewhere between 100,000 and 1 million people and up, you are talking about a coherent internet policy and a system of accountability involving many people
but somewhere between 100,000 and 10,000 people and down, and you're talking about "uh, call bubba, he runs that stuff"
so i consider estonia's internet freedom reputation useful and valid, but not liechtenstein's
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The US is FAR more dangerous in my mind than the nations you listed. China, Iran, and Cuba are relatively open about their censorship and restrictions while the US does its best to portray the opposite. The US eliminates almost all practical freedom, requires government permits for the vast majority of daily activity, provides almost no government services while being among the highest taxing nation relative to controlled wealth, and proactively concentrates wealth into the hands of a tiny portion of the population. The US however does all these things but gives justifications for all these actions indicating they are for the public good or are unavoidable side effects.
Oh come on. China also claim that all the stuff they do is for the common good. There's no way the US could possibly be considered worse than China, and it really is a lot better in quite a lot of ways. The problem is that many Americans think that "better than China" means something and is something to be proud of, when it's damningly faint praise.
I do think developments in the US are dangerous, exactly because the US was always supposed to be on the side of freedom, its greatest champion even, but lately
Re:Below Germany? (Score:5, Insightful)
Failing to criticize our national governments simply because others do worse guarantees a slow creep towards that worse behaviour because anything less is, by your reasoning, acceptable. The fact that Iran, Burma, and China engage in broader and more extensive internet control and suppression doesn't make the ICE domain seizures more acceptable or infringe freedoms any less.
Further, I personally believe that we have a greater obligation to ensure our home country is abiding by the principals we want other countries to. Not only does it clear us of hypocrisy (see US on torture and prisons) when attempting to convince other countries to reform their practices, it provides a clear example that it can be done without catastrophic consequences (assuming they don't see our culture itself being a catastrophe), and is how our government is structured to function. Limiting our scope to local issues is often a matter of conserving our efforts and avoiding tilting at windmills. I can't personally stop hunger in Africa but I can ensure my neighbours get invited over for dinner frequently because I know that the adults in their house frequently miss meals to ensure that their kids always get fed. The same principle applies to world affairs - I can make real (though small) changes in the US but ignoring them because China is worse leaves the entire world a worse place.
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Submitter here,
I agree with that point and dont think I could have put it any better.
The eyes of Australia's entire IT industry are on Senator Conroy like a hawk, the Labor party who proposed filtering in 2008 faced a revolt from their own back bench over the policy in 2009 and it failed to pass because the Greens and Independents voted against it.
My point with this sub
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The fact that worse things happen does not mean that something shouldn't be done about the 'lesser' things. The reason you probably hear so much about the USA's 'wrongdoings' is because they, for some reason, seem to be the center of attention (and they claim to be a bastion of freedom, or at least that's what people think). So when this 'great' country does something wrong, people will criticize them more than other countries that they already knew were 'bad'. They may see other places as lost causes (and believe that their criticism will be wasted on them).
The US really was a bastion of freedom for a long time. In the past, the US has done quite a lot to spread the notion of the importance of freedom, and set some good examples. And that's exactly why it hurts so much when the US chooses against freedom. China was never in the freedom camp to begin with. Of course they are worse. But now the free world sees their former champion hurrying to join the Chinese camp, and that hurts. Criticizing that is entirely justified.
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*I forget the precident, but it's the computer misuse thing. Can't do anything with a computer not clearly authorised by the owner.
Where's Japan? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not even on the list.
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Or Canada for that matter...
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I would hesitate to say that anyone was first, let alone fourth.
Why the focus on Australia? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not whoever is in 83rd place? It seems like "Estonia Ranked First In Internet Freedom" would be the real story.
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There is no 83rd country. The list is not even close to a worldwide rankings on internet freedom. There are only 2 from Europe and the reason Germany is not higher is due to Nazi (mainly I think Holocaust Denial ) censorship.
South America also looks pretty free.
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South America also looks pretty free.
Brazil. Venezuela not so much. But again, no surprises there.
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The thing is though is that australia doesn't censor the internet, nor is it monitored (without a court warrant, something common to everywhere)
The government proposed it, then dropped it when it realised it would be deeply unpopular.
Australia *does* have censorship issues, but its about Games, not the internet. Just because its computers, don't mean its the same. (In fact what makes the games censorship ironic is the fact that with an uncensored internet we can download it from uncensored and unmon
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I think it's because, with all the talk coming from Australia about censoring the internet, and all the actual banning of games they do, it's kind of surprising that Australia made it that high.
Yep, that's exactly why I submitted the article.
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I think the story is: "Despite all the crazy and poorly thought out internet rules, Australia is still not as bad as China."
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In Australia there is a relatively large "think of the children" vote so various rules have been pending since about 2004 as a shameless political vote buying exercise from all three major parties. That carrot has thankfully been out of reach since then but there has been some action. Websites for Dentists and dog kennels have been blocked and stupid stuff has occurred on a small scale. Home grown porn has ensured hosting is ov
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That's a really short list. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's a really short list. (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely.
One of the very few things that make me proud about my country (Argentina) is our internet freedom. Our connections aren't great, but they ain't bad either, and they are cheap and just about everywhere (you can get unlimited, uncensored cablemodem 6mbps down, 1 mbps up for ~30 dollars a month, and unlimited, uncensored 3G 3mbps down, 512kbps up for ~25 dollars a month). Domains (*.ar) are absolutely FREE for life, and there's no limit on what you can register (I have domains that contain all 7 words, are anti-government, anti-religion, and anti-corporations, I've had them for years, and none of them has been taken away or filtered in any way). Our copyright laws are fairly sane (well, as insane as copyright itself is, they aren't as bad as the states), and we have no DMCA or any other similar shit). ISPs don't hand out information without a court order, and neither do host companies. Nobody has been sued for file-sharing, and no ISP is throttling or limiting p2p connections.
But we aren't even on the list, go figure ...
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and no Denmark, with their mandatory CP-blocking list (that's privately run) and DNS-blocking of whatever the local version of *AA don't like.
Note to self (Score:2)
Australia internet is free unless... (Score:2)
You want to play adult rated video games on it.
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Or in fact if you want to host a porn site. The restrictions are pretty serious. Better to look overseas.
They're not just measuring government censorship (Score:2)
From TFPDF linked in TFA on TFFH website:
customs (Score:2)
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Notice she was very careful not to say her DVDs were confiscated? Because they weren't; Customs "were only interested in illegal pornography".
... or else, you'll be allowed to keep it?
Out of 34 (carefuly) slected contries (Score:2)
Of which only 8 have 'free' internet. There is a lot of European and other countries that may have a more free web. Thus the rankings are pretty worthless. My extrapolating the results it would be likely that across Europe would most likely be 10 above the rest of listed non -European countries.
I would like to think New Zealand's web is more open than Australia's we do have a filter but it has not been forced on ISPs.
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I would like to think New Zealand's web is more open than Australia's we do have a filter but it has not been forced on ISPs.
How is that more open? Australia doesn't have a filter at all.
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The labor party seem to have shelved it though filtering is still an official policy for the future. Note that I used present tense.
Shelved? (Score:2)
China (Score:5, Funny)
What rank is China ? Is there anyone below ?
I would love to RTFA, but I can't access the report myself. They must have some technical difficulties in Beijing these days, because freedomhouse.org seems to be unavailable.
Strange headline (Score:2, Funny)
Why did it choose to mention who is number Four, as opposed to, say, number 26 on the charts? Why not say "US leads in Internet Freedom"? Is there a private conversation here that /.'ers aren't seeing? Or do I need my morning coffee?
"Yes. When you read the headline and it says, so and so is number four, it means, We attack at dawn. If it says, so and so leads in freedom, that's the signal to Abort the mission. If it mentions Estonia in the headline, that simply means His Highness prefers pepperoni, hold off
Re: (Score:2)
Why did it choose to mention who is number Four, as opposed to, say, number 26 on the charts? Why not say "US leads in Internet Freedom"? Is there a private conversation here that /.'ers aren't seeing? Or do I need my morning coffee?
Submitter here, The article I based the submission on, is an Australian site. I chose the headline to dispel largely held beliefs amongst non-Australian /.ers. It is sad, I agree but people need to understand that there is no government enforced ISP censorship in Australia. It was defeated in Parliament 2 years ago, but is mentioned on /. to this very day.
It's the equivalent of me calling the US a rebellious British colony, which of course has been untrue for hundreds of years.
First place! (Score:2)
Hell yeah. Proud to be Estonian.
Every once in a while discussion seems to pop up on the subject of freedom of expression on the Internet but so far, as for making decisions, common sense seems to have prevailed. I hope that it stays that way for a while more.
Re: (Score:2)
The joke's on you, considering Antarctica isn't a country ...