Senator Conroy, our new Minister of Communications has proven that the Labor Party still do not understand the Internet.
Mark Latham in his wonderfully vindictive apologia, The Latham Diaries, writes that in the dying days of the Keating government the then Minister of Communications was terrified of Telstra and virtually at their beck and call.
Whilst Conroy has been pretty hairy-chested in his approach to the Telco, the Rudd government appear to be trying to out-nanny the Howard government by censoring Internet content.
Not even Howard attempted to server-level Internet filters to protect our fragile morals. And this is the man responsible for banning homosexual marriage, encouraging women to be housewives and supporting Pauline Hansen. Howard did send every Australian household web filtering software that was cracked by a 6 year old in 20 minutes before the election. But even he didn’t deem it necessary to filter content on a server level.
Senator Fielding, this parliament’s official tool, supports the idea and has prescribed a predictable shopping list of horrible things we need to be protected from.
I wonder if Bill Hensen is on the list? Thank god for the Greens.
The technology is unlikely to work without some smarts that can parse binary files. If it is word based it will just slow our connections down and be a hindrance to online business in Australia. It will not stop kiddie porn freaks wanking to Target underwear catalogues.
There is a bright side. Perhaps our future leaders will cut their teeth hacking what I think should be called The Great Digital Fence. They will hone hard core skills that will lead to a boom in technology and innovation.
Or perhaps we’ll have just have to buy Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the bookstore rather than online?
A disclaimer: I do not support any form of child porn or freakish abusive stuff. I simply oppose Internet censorship.