

First, China. Next: the Great Firewall of... Australia? - MikeCapone
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1995615,00.html?xid=rss-world&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+time/world+(TIME:+Top+World+Stories)

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dmharrison
As someone just getting started with my own small tech company I find this
quite alarming. I particularly find the technical cluelessness of senator
Conroy the most disturbing thing. With technical absolutes that the filter
will be ineffectual and easily bypassed and an impediment to broadband speeds
it seems to be just ignored and the technological costs are treated as
malleable when they're not. My main fear is that when this is found to not be
effective protecting children or stemming child porn it won't be removed,
rather will be extended and creep deeper and deeper into our infrastructure.

It just means whenever I look for hosting, internet services etc it means I'm
already deliberately using services not based in Aus which I think will be a
long term trend and detriment to the technology industry here. Just adding
latency to any service as it has an extra few hops through the filter is a
cost I wouldn't expect customers to bare.

The impact on Australia's technical reputation I think is the major thing.
Previously travelling a bit and being involved in a US-AUS acquisition;
Australians tended to be pretty well respected technologically, and with this,
I fear that we're going to have that reputation quashed and look like
luddites.

I plan on writing a series of letters to the ministers and chronicling the
results if anyone's interested. I also encourage any other fellow aussies to
do the same. Here's some good tips on writing letters to parliamentarians and
get a good chance of reply <http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/lobby.html> and
this one for the more subversive [http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/16/dont-
waste-your-time-was...](http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/16/dont-waste-your-
time-waste-theirs-a-guide-to-writing-to-ministers/)

------
pmccool
Hopefully, adding "Australia is rapidly becoming an international
laughingstock" to the list of reasons to drop this stupid law will convince
Conroy. I doubt it, though; "it won't work", "most people oppose it" and "it's
on shaky legal ground" don't seem to have convinced him.

~~~
mattmanser
This was inevitable, this isn't going to be the aberration, this will be the
norm. There will be no laughing, there will be other governments thinking 'why
aren't we doing that'. There will be the Daily Mails declaring a breakdown in
law because of our failure to legislate. (The Daily Mail being the popular
conservative newspaper in the UK, substitute with your regional equivalent).

Censorship to TV, to Movies, to CDs, to all forms of media has long happened
because most societies, irrespective of our personal beliefs as hackers,
libertarians, free thinkers, believe there are lines that should not be
crossed.

To lambast the list itself is purely pedantic, to despairingly declare 'why a
dental surgery?' without speculating that it had probably been hacked and was
hosting something distasteful is pathetic. We know exactly how vulnerable the
web is, we know how many sites get hacked like that all the time. How easy it
is to hide stuff.

Did we all seriously believe the wild west of the web would continue as it
has?

My honest assessment is that we have been living in a censor less utopia only
because the web was initially too small and minor and too hard to understand
for legislature. Everything was moving too fast. The microscope is finally
turning to it and the Iceland's will be the minority, not the majority.

And ultimately, for purely tax receipts and business reasons, those lines that
can't be crossed will include copyright violations.

I mean look at the quote in the piece _"Nobody likes it," says Scott Ludlam, a
senator from the Australian Greens Party_.

The Green Party? That's the best they could come up with? If you are being
truly objective, that's almost as bad as quoting the BNP saying that no-one
likes immigration or the KKK saying no-one likes blacks. Yes, I'm
exaggerating, but Greens are pretty far on the left-wing of politics.

~~~
dmharrison
Australia's heading to an election later this year and with the series of
missteps by the Rudd/Labor camp (mining tax, education revolution, dodgy
insulation implementation) it's likely that the greens will hold the balance
of power in the senate, so if the greens don't like it, there's a fair chance
it won't make it into legislation.

I'd say the Australian greens are closer to the democratic party in the US or
the liberal democrats in the UK. So I'd put them center left on average.

~~~
nl
_I'd say the Australian greens are closer to the democratic party in the US or
the liberal democrats in the UK. So I'd put them center left on average._

Um, no.

The Australian Labor party would be on the center-left wing of the US
Democratic party. Even the strong right wing faction of the Australian Labor
party is well to the left of the "Blue Dog" Democrats
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Dog_Coalition>). For example, one member
of the right wing faction of the Labor party is the federal health minister
(Nicola Roxon - see <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Right#In_Victoria>),
and her biggest policy is a take over of state-run health systems by the
federal government. No blue dogger would support that, and I doubt it would
get majority support within the US Democratic party.

Both Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan are right faction members
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Right#In_Queensland>), and they came up
with the mining tax! That isn't exactly a centralist policy (by US standards
anyway)!

The Greens are well to the left of Australian Labor on both social and
economic issues. I suspect they are close to the UK Liberal Democrats on
social issues, but to the left of them on economic issues.

~~~
dmharrison
I guess what I was trying to point out is that they're not the crazy greens
social enviro anarchist party that you'd tend to think of if you heard of the
'greens' for the first time (generally). They're 'closer' but I agree I
wouldn't consider them equivalent or overlapping on an absolute scale. The US
center being quite different from the Aus center of course, but normalising
across countries is bound to result in a loss of direction.

I do wonder if voting wasn't so constrained to party lines what we'd end up
with though.

~~~
nl
I agree that they aren't a _crazy greens social enviro anarchist party_ , but
I think many people might be surprised just how left wing they are. Their
economic policies include things like:

only allowing losses from an investment to be offset against income from the
same investment;

introducing a tax on extreme wealth applied to the wealthiest 5% of people.

return the company tax rate to 33% and broaden the company tax base by
reducing tax concessions.

etc etc

<http://greens.org.au/policies/sustainable-economy/economics>

Having said that, I'll probably be voting green (and have before). Not sure
about my preferences, though.

I wish there was a socially progressive, economically centralist party in
Australia. Pity the Australian Democrats collapsed.

------
vorg
"99% of the 88,645 people who responded to the survey said they were against
the Internet filter" Perhaps the percentage is less for a random sample, only
90% maybe. It doesn't help to use numbers from an obviously flawed data
collection method to support the cause.

~~~
JacobAldridge
True, that number of responses is unlikely to have come from a 'proper'
polling company, where samples of only a few thousand are used. So it's most
likely an online or activist-driven poll, which is hardly a representative or
random sample.

Edit: Re-read the section which noted it was an online poll for one of the
larger newspapers ( _SMH_ ). Hardly reliable as representative of the
population.

------
vorg
China says they built the Great Firewall to stop child porn, foreign-
manipulated political views, etc. But a year ago, they extended the blocks to
entire sites, e.g. all of Blogspot, Google Groups, and Youtube, not just the
specific pages dealing with taboo subjects, like they do with Wikipedia.
Obviously aimed at the company that runs those sites. Australia could go down
the same road.

~~~
pmccool
I doubt it. Australia has an implied freedom of political communication (per
the Lange and Coleman v Power cases). This law is on shaky legal ground
already. Blocking entire sites will make it more likely that the law will be
struck down.

It would also be more politically risky.

No doubt they could try - it's technically possible - but I think they
wouldn't.

I agree that the fact that this law could be abused in such a way is a
compelling objection to it.

~~~
nl
Political sites in Australia have already been refused classification (ie,
would be blocked).

There was a candidate in the recent South Australian election who ran on an
anti-abortion platform who's website was later refused classification. See
[http://lifenetwork.org.au/_bpost_2642/Australian_Government_...](http://lifenetwork.org.au/_bpost_2642/Australian_Government_censors_anti-
abortion_websites)

