Australia censors the internet. Good news, I say.
Posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 10:41am. #
Robert Scoble is furious. Techcrunch US is drawing parallels with China. They’re angry because Australia has announced plans to censor the internet.
Except it hasn’t.
Australia used to offer a free copy of Net Nanny to any citizen that asked for it. This made sense: some parents might choose to offer a sanitised version of the internet to their family. There’s undeniably a lot of unpleasant things on the web (hello, goatse!), and a version of the internet without that stuff does nothing other than encourage use of the internet by those that are sensitive to this kind of thing.
Net Nanny has a few problems.
- It’s Windows only; so users with an Apple Mac, or an Ubuntu box, can’t use it. For those that want a ‘clean’ feed, this may be a deterrent to go with a non-Windows setup. And it won’t help your kid’s PSP, iPod Touch, or other internet-enabled devices.
- It’s easy to get round. There are plenty of sites that help you hack the software; and plenty of proxy sites which can bypass the software too.
- It’s made by one US manufacturer, and using it cedes an awful lot of control to one commercial company. Might they censor anti-NetNanny material? Might they be pro-Bush? Might they be pro-Howard, or pro-Rudd?
Instead, the Australian government is planning to replace the on request copy of Net Nanny, with, instead, an on request cleaned feed. It’s not hackable by your average computer user, it works on every type of operating system including the kids’ PSP or DS Lite. And it’s not run by a commercial company; whether you consider it being run by the government as more insidious is probably up to you, but at the end of the day, the magic words are on request, so you actively have to opt-in to it.
The chances are that you, the reader of this blog, already have a form of censorship on your internet connection: if you’re using Firefox, or you use Google to search, you’re using a connection which actively stops you from going to phishing or malware sites.
I go one further. I use Open DNS for my internet connection at home, which, by request, blocks those sorts of sites and also, by request, blocks pornographic or adult content. It could even block sites like MySpace if I wanted it to. It’s a fine, fine service: works on anything (including my iPod Touch) and is highly recommended, even if you don’t turn the content restrictions on. But it takes a certain type of geek to know about it, much less to configure your home router to use it.
In short, the Australian government are mandating internet companies to make a clean feed available to any of its citizens on request. Parents, and others, can request this service to be activated on their machines - or not, as the case may be.
If (and this is a big if) the service continues to be opt-in - to be “on request” - then for all the reasons given above, I think Kevin Rudd has done a great thing for Australia, not a bad thing; and that he should be congratulated.
(If the service turns into an opt-out service, then we should fight it with all our might.)
– UPDATE –
There’s confusion as to whether it’s opt-in (good), or opt-out (bad); in spite of Scoble’s instant reply. And worth pointing out that I’m not alone - Bobbie Johnson is all for it, even if it’s opt-out (which I’m much less happy about).
Thomas said at December 31st, 2007 at 2:17pm 
Frank Calabrese said at January 2nd, 2008 at 12:25pm 
