[LINK] The rallies???

Danny Yee danny at anatomy.usyd.edu.au
Tue Dec 16 08:56:16 AEDT 2008


Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> The ACMA list has existed for some years, but its growth rate has always
> been pretty slow. I can't see anything that would spur a huge growth in
> the list...
 
The ACMA blacklist is built up solely from complaints.  At the
moment, there's no incentive for vigilantes to complain about overseas
content, since they'll never see any effect.  If there's mandatory ISP
filtering, however, vigilantes will see content becoming unavailable,
which will provide positive feedback.

Possibly the intersection of vigilante wowsers and people with the
technical nous to automate submissions to ACMA is small, but I'm pretty
sure Australia has enough wowsers that even submitting material by
hand they can generate some increase in growth.

> Nor is it a matter of simply "getting things blocked" by ACMA. The
> statistics published by ACMA show that there's a fairly constant rate of
> "no action" - that is, someone made a complaint, but ACMA and the OFLC
> did not agree that the content fitted the "refused classification"
> definitions, and decide not to add the site to the banned list.
 
Indeed.  And the staff at ACMA clearly don't have a good grasp of
the National Code, as Irene has demonstrated.

But all X-rated content and most R-rated content (not restricted
to adult access) is potentially prohibited, so there are surely a
billion or more potentially prohibited pages out there.

I don't expect a complaints-based ACMA list to ever cover more than
a tiny fraction of those pages.  I do think it could easily grow to
10,000 or 100,000 pages.  This may be why the government talks about
expansion to 10,000 pages, though my thought is that that's what
they expect to get from merging in the IWF's blacklist and maybe a
few other similar ones.

Danny.




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