Filtering Australian’s Internet is something all good politicians learned to avoid long ago after the fiasco that was Labor’s Clean Feed. It quickly turned from being what seemed like an easily defensible policy (Think of the children!) to the horrendous mess that it was, something that threatened the very core of what the Internet was built on. Thus any policy that dares to tread similar ground has, for the most part, been put down long before the legislation makes it to the floor of our parliament. However it seems that, in true Liberal fashion, our current government wants to put a filter in but is flatly denying that that’s what they’re doing.
Last year Brandis and Turnbull got in cahoots with each other to start devising some reforms to Australia’s copyright system, most likely in response to some of the secret Trans-Pacific Partnership talks that have been going on. These reforms largely ignored the actual problem and instead adopted the reactionary measures that other countries have adopted, all of which have proven ineffective in curbing copyright infringement. However one of the measures, the requirement for ISPs to block links to infringing content when contacted, had a strange bit of familiarity of it.
It sounded an awful lot like an Internet filter.
When he was made aware of this comparison Turnbull was quick to distance it from the idea, calling it “complete BS”. However whilst you might not want to call it a filter (obviously for fear of being tarred with the same brush, but I’m about to do that anyway) it, unfortunately, has all the makings of Internet filter. It’ll be overseen by the courts, which likely means there’ll be some kind of central list of blocked content, which all ISPs will be required to block using whatever means they have. If you cast your mind back a few years you’ll see that this was pretty much identical to Labor’s voluntary mandatory system, the one that was dumped for “budgetary” reasons.
The time has long since passed when this was just an issue for the technical elite and freedom of speech warriors of Australia as the entire country is far more invested in its access to the Internet than it ever has been. We want it to be fast and unfettered, ideals which the current government seems hellbent on trashing in order to appease big businesses both here and overseas. Unfortunately for them it looks like they’re slow learners, unable to recognise the mistakes of their predecessors and are simply dooming themselves to repeat them. Not that this was entirely unexpected, but that doesn’t stop it all from being just as rage inducing.
