The other day I posted on the incredibly restrictive online censorship regime cooked up by Helen Coonan, apparently in response to the “furore” over Big Brother last year. Now, it would appear that the government has backed down, at least to a degree. You can read about the latest in this fiasco at Crikey’s website in a piece by Margaret Simons. She also has a story today about reaction to the initial draft bill, which is reproduced (with kind permission) over the fold.
Margaret Simons writes:
Since Crikey published the Government’s draft Bill to censor content on the internet on Tuesday it has been chewed over by content providers nationwide – and generated considerable alarm, including among bloggers who are becoming aware that they may be caught in its net.
Peter Black, an associate lecturer in law at the Queensland University of Technology and author of the Freedom to Differ blog has written an online summary and critique of the Bill. He concludes in part:
This regime would have a significant chilling effect on free speech in Australia as any content provider would be very reluctant to post any content that may be prohibited or potentially prohibited. When in doubt, the content would not be posted and speech would, in effect, be limited.
Meanwhile Kimberlee Weatherall, Associate Director of the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia writes on her Lawfront blog:
This draft doesn’t pass the laugh test. Really. It is inconsistent with fundamental values like freedom of speech and freedom of information; it is broad, draconian, and wouldn’t work, it is completely out of step with the way the internet works.
Duncan Riley, one of the grand young men of Australia’s new media industry online, puts the debate into an international context on his news site 901am. Riley sees the Bill as part of a wave of moves internationally to undermine the democratization of information made possible by the web:
There is little doubt that freedom online is actually in decline as opposed to expanding… many of these laws and legal decisions can and do result in further power being taken away from the individual and handed to corporations who have the power and money to operate within the new layers of bureaucracy.
Meanwhile a debate had started up on Larvatus Prodeo with Mark Bahnisch opining:
We now have a completely confused and misdirected draft bill… As you might expect from a government characterised by control-freakery, the bill seeks to regulate content far broader than just streaming video from reality TV programmes.
Bahnisch’s respondents are beginning to talk about a political campaign.
As reported elsewhere in Crikey today, there has already been a backdown in Government and redrafting is in progress. The Government has assured industry representatives that it has no intention of making content illegal on the internet that would be legal when distributed in other forms.
In a response to queries from Crikey this morning, Minister Helen Coonan’s office claimed “The Minister’s Office has contacted a number of organisations that have expressed concerns in relation to the scope of the Bill to assure them that their concerns are not material and a number have taken up the offer of further consultation, with the remainder now satisfied that they concerns were based on misinformation.”
Like fun. The content providing bodies I am talking to are still either spitting chips or suspicious and only partially reassured.
Meanwhile the blogosphere is only just hitting its stride.
i hate this government
my blog is definitely rated MA15 , but only because infantile minds like Coonan’s would not want to understand half of it.
speaking of which – Turkey has slapped a ban on youtube today.
It seems writing references is about to be slapped too!
I’d recommend bloggers use a government-sponsored blog with guaranteed readership by politicians to protest (and parliamentary privilege) : make a submission when it gets to committee after the first reading. Here at deadroo we’ve started to keep track of bills accepting submissions and encouraging people to get involved – even a couple of paras helps. I even appeared to have a win.
See http://www.deadroo.com/index.php/participation/ and subsequent posts (with the tag Democracy) for details – then maybe do something similar within your own discussion groups.
Spending 5% of your normal blogging time reading and commenting to the “official parliamentary blog” would make a difference.
Its about time, I say!
I clearly remember when Don Finlayson told Abigail that he was homosexual. Right then and there I said there ought to be a law about that.
This country has been going to the dogs ever since. Freedom of speech is all very well if you have something sensible to say.
You are Fred Nile, and I claim my five pounds.
The only social contract I ever signed said FUCK ALL GOVERNMENTS.
(pardon my French)
It seems that governments everywhere, or maybe that should be ‘ruling classes’, are waking up to the threat that the internet poses to the establishment. I’m not suggesting that there’s a deep conspiracy, just an instinctive uneasiness at the prospect of people being able to publish opinions and information in a format that can’t be supervised and controlled if need be by either the executive government or the judiciary.
Maybe the biggest concern is the half-sensed prospect of genuine citizen participation in government. Enough to send shivers down the spine of any politician or bureaucrat.
Egypt is the latest country to feel the censorship urge.
Expect a growing muttering from governments everywhere about the need to regulate the net to fix ill-defined problems to do with intellectual property, public decency, privacy, and most of all, national security (those damn terrurists done sent emails to each other, you know).