Won't somebody think of the children? This mantra is being used with great effect by the Australian government to increase its control over what Australians see, watch and do - all, ostensibly, in the name of protecting the nation's youth. And a scheme that amounts to censorship is coming closer: the government has said that it wants to start live trials of ISP-level content filtering before Christmas.
In January, the government annouunced its $A128.5m (£55.2m) Plan for Cyber-Safety - a content-filtering scheme based on the pre-election pledge of Kevin Rudd, who became prime minister last year. His plan follows the failure of the A$189m NetAlert scheme put in place by the government of John Howard, who was defeated in the last federal election.
The plan was put together by Australian Labor senator Stephen Conroy, the minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy, with the aim of protecting children from pornography and violent websites and the banning outright of illegal material.
Australians will be unable to opt out of the scheme. Senator Conroy told the Australian media: "Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road. If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the government is going to disagree."
Keeping it clean
The scheme will require ISPs to offer a "clean-feed" web service to all homes, schools and public internet access points. There will be two blacklists: one that blocks all illegal material, such as child pornography; and the second which blocks a list of things deemed unsuitable for children, to be determined by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). Only the latter blacklist will be optional.
What better rationale than children's sensibilities to reassure people the trampling of their rights is worth it? The Australian government's agenda on national censorship is based on an appeal to emotion - it doesn't matter what it bans or censors, it can always claim it's for the benefit of children.
However, the response has been largely hostile. An online poll by the Courier-Mail newspaper in Queensland showed that some 86% of respondents do not support the scheme. And concerns that it is technically impossible to implement and will slow further Australia's already slow internet speeds by as much as 30% are just some of the fears.
Civil liberties groups say that the scheme is an infringement of Australians' rights. Colin Jacobs, who chairs the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, says: "I'm not exaggerating when I say that this model involved more technical interference in the internet infrastructure that what is attempted in Iran, one of the most regressive censorship regimes in the world."
Australia doesn't have a good track record on censorship. For example, the continued refusal by the attorneys-general of Australia to introduce an R18+ classification for videogames is just one issue in addition to the proposed filtering scheme.
When DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was first published in 1928, Australia was not the only nation to ban the book. But 40 years later, it remained one of the only countries where the ban was still in force. Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho is still in effect banned in the state of Queensland - the book is classified a Category 1 publication, meaning it cannot be sold in the state and must be sealed in plastic before it is sold anywhere else. And Australia's previous attempt to censor the internet is nothing to be proud of. In August last year, 16-year-old Tom Wood was able to hack through the NetAlert filters, put in place by the previous government at a cost said to be A$84m, in just half an hour (Are web filters just a waste of everyone's time and money? August 30 2007). When the Australian government was apprised of that, it added another filter; Wood cracked that in 10 minutes.
Helen Coonan, the then communications minister, said at the time that "unfortunately, no single measure can protect children from online harm and ... traditional parenting skills have never been more important". But perhaps that has been rethought in favour of ever more ambitious filters. While nobody would argue that it's important for everyone to have access to child pornography, the counter-argument - that it's more important to find the tiny number of people who access such content and prosecute them, while leaving everyone else alone - doesn't seem to have occurred to the Australian government.
Who benefits?
The Rudd government has released the results of a lab trial carried out last year by the ACMA, a closed-environment test of ISP-level content filters which tested the effect on network traffic and its effectiveness at identifying and blocking banned content. While the filtering technology had improved since a trial in 2005, what is clear is that a slower network is guaranteed. Of the six ISP-level filters tested in July by the ACMA, the majority caused drops in speed between 21% and 86%. The filters also proved inaccurate, with a significant number of innocuous pages blocked (1.3% to 7.8%) and unsafe pages let through (2% to 13%).
What's more, the scheme will only be applied to web traffic, meaning that peer-to-peer filesharing will not be filtered, despite accounting for an estimated 60% of internet traffic in Australia.
The government has tried to get around these problems by pointing to Britain, Sweden, Canada and New Zealand, which all have similar filtering systems. However, in those countries the filtering systems are not mandatory. In the UK, BT's CleanFeed system uses a list of thousands of sites hosting content such as child pornography provided by the UK-based Internet Watch Foundation; the list is offered without compulsion to ISPs.
The Australian government is commited to pushing ahead with its trials, despite the overwhelmingly negative reaction. Nobody seems to be benefiting from the move - except possibly the ISPs, who will be able to charge for additional filters. The children the government is so keen to protect will simply see their internet speeds degraded.