After being as indecisive as a teenage girl choosing what to wear on prom night, Senator Conroy has settled on what classification category will be banned by under the mandatory filter (the one you can’t opt out of). According to IT News, Conroy’s office stated that ‘mandatory ISP-level filtering will only apply to RC content drawn from complaints made to the ACMA‘.
There’s two main problems with that:
- Refused Classification (or RC) is an extremely broad classification category which includes movies like Ken Park, adult pornography containing fetishes like spanking and euthanasia instruction material like The Peaceful Pill Handbook. It’s also legal to possess and view in Australia (with the exception of Western Australia and some indigenous communities in the Northern Territory and where not illegal under other criminal codes).
- If the Government intends for the filter to protect children online, relying on complaints to block RC content means the vast majority of it will remain unblocked and easily accessible.
Colin Jacobs from EFA agrees. He told IT News:
‘Filtering out a handful of RC-only sites won’t make the Internet any safer for kids, nor will it slow down the traffic in illegal material. Yet it still comes at a high cost, both financially and to our freedom of speech. It seems more about fulfilling an election promise than achieving any particular policy aim.’
10 comments
Andrew Garrett says:
Jun 2, 2009
It also seems to include strip poker games, if my understanding is correct (see )
Mike says:
Jun 2, 2009
That it does
Matthew says:
Jun 3, 2009
Mike, I thought that the classifiaction board rated the anti-abortion site as R18+. At least that’s what was said on Whirlpool. Think they had a link the classification in the OFLC database.
Also with fetishes, I think the problem here is that can’t you buy R18+ Catagory 2 magazines with most fetishes in them? If that’s so how the hell would that be treated on the web? You can have photos as well as movies of course, so it’d be OK for spanking in a still image, but no movies of it? This is really not well thought out at all.
Mike says:
Jun 3, 2009
Hi Matt, you’re right. Post updated. Apologies.
Simon says:
Jun 3, 2009
An election promise that, if my understanding is correct, was never actually made. This goes from stupid to stupider.
Fiona says:
Jun 3, 2009
Simon, the election promise was to the Australian Christian Lobby – silly us for a) missing church that day and not knowing about it b) voting this mob in!
alphamone says:
Jun 4, 2009
im sorry,
but,
SPANKING IS RC?
O.o
Granted I don’t know much about the fine details of that fetish, but I can’t realy think how spanking fetish related materials without any other type of material (multiple fetishes in a single image seem to be seen by the government as X times as bad as an image with a single fetish).
Simon says:
Jun 4, 2009
I know there were election promises around internet filtering, but to my knowledge there was never a mention of the word ‘mandatory’ before the election. If I’m wrong (a strong possibility) I’d love for someone to point me to where this promise was made.
Disentangler says:
Jun 10, 2009
So I guess people who were born either with one of the 126+ biological and or congenital intersex conditions, and or people who are transgender, will be barred from gaining access to websites with medical and other help and resource information, under these bazaar censorship regimes, do to the fact that some psychiatric literature still classifies their conditions as being of a fetish nature.
For that matter, I’m guessing that any kind of information relating to gay, lesbian and bisexual issues will also fall under that RC listing?
Censorsdyne launched as Children’s groups oppose filter (but Conroy says they’re wrong) - Somebody Think Of The Children says:
Jul 9, 2009
[...] Restricting the access of Australian Internet users to legal content is certainly an attack on freedom of speech. [...]