Reverse censorship psychology Aussie style
Like most other countries around the world governments are trying hard to enact laws; or publicly shame companies, into censoring the Internet. In most cases; unless you live in China are some other draconian type country, these attempts have to this point been a massive failure. Even though, it still hasn’t stopped governments desperate for votes to keep on trying.
The most recent case has been in Australia where the government has been pushing far all kinds of different methods to control what Australians are being allowed to see or read. One of the things that the Aussie government has tried in the pass is to encourage the ISP’s of the country to voluntarily use government sanctioned filters on their pipes. Needless to say that this effort proved to be a resounding failure with no one using them.
So the government has decided to step up the stakes of the game and make using the filters a legal requirement – one that no one is allowed to opt out of. Regardless of this idea now being forced down the throats of the country’s ISP some of them aren’t planning on rolling over and playing dead.
One of those people is Michael Malone, the boss of Australia’s second largest ISP iiNet and even though he thinks the whole idea stinks he will be signing up for it. However he has no intention of making the idea one that will get people all excited over but instead plans on publicizing its every failure.
Malone’s main purpose was to provide the Government with “hard numbers” demonstrating “how stupid it is” – specifically that the filtering system would not work, would be patently simple to bypass, would not filter peer-to-peer traffic and would significantly degrade network speeds. “They’re not listening to the experts, they’re not listening to the industry, they’re not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help,” he said. “Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we’ll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we’ll be publicising it.”
How successful this plan will be against government bureaucracy and it’s need to show it is doing something against the evils of the Internet to help get votes in the next election still remains to be seen.
