[LINK] Labor bid to block net porn

[Chris Maltby]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 07:13:27PM +1000, Robin Whittle wrote:
> What use is an opposition which tries to out-rot the rotters in power?

Fair question.

> First the banning of same-sex marriages - on grounds of protecting the
> "family".  Second passing the FTA on grounds of not wanting to be seen
> by the unwashed masses as being anti-American.  Now Internet censorship
> as if it was possible to make connecting to the Net a child-safe
> experience.

I'm not an apologist for the idea, but I think I understand the politics.
Anyway, the proposed "ban" is only until you opt-out (for now :-).

> It can't be, as long as children are using "chat" programs
> or email - and it is very difficult to reliably filter ordinary HTTP
> traffic to achieve what any one person might regard as "acceptable for
> children".

And any web content that doesn't touch port 80 is also likely to be
unfiltered too. But it will fix the "off-by-one" typos taking you to
explicit sites problem, which may be sufficient for some for a time.

> Adult supervision is required, and adults can choose their own level of
> filtering for their children.  It is better, though still not perfect,
> to do it on the computer itself.  It would, in principle, be possible to
> restrict a child's access to a very small set of trustworthy websites -
> but that can only be done for the individual computer, not at the ISP,
> unless the ISP is to be driven nuts by personalised and constantly
> changing filtering requirements.  Also, the idea that a government
> mandated scheme can be reliably "child-safe" is nuts.  There is no
> agreed standard of what this means.  It would have to rule out all
> communications of a "chat" nature.

But the problem is one of lack of parental supervision - and the search
for a way to "fail safe" when parents abrogate their responsibility. As
you say, chat and filesharing etc are at least as big a problem, and not
easy to control at the ISP.

> How could they filter email to stop it being non child-friendly?  Its
> impossible.  Most email is now done by Web-mail anyway - such as
> yahoo.com.au.  The page http://www.yahoo.com.au is in Sydney, but
> sending a message from it involves a server (in my test)
> web50108.mail.yahoo.com which is in the USA.

Quite.

> Besides, if Australia unilaterally blocks "porn" or any such thing,
> won't this be in violation of the FTA?

Good point, porn is IP, and largely owned by US corporations. I suppose
it would be ok to block it as long as we also blocked home-grown porn
in the same way, and paid the compensation to the companies affected
by haphazard government regulation...

Chris