Stephen Conroy was on The 7PM project last night defending his mandatory internet filter. Seriously, if that guy says child pornography one more time, I’m gonna go crazy.
As good a job as the hosts did of bringing up the main issues involved with the filter, watching this really makes me long for a proper debate between Conroy and someone who actually knows the intricacies of the technical aspects related to filtering. Because it’s so easy for Conroy to get away with saying “Mark Newton from Internode was wrong” in an eight-minute segment without getting challenged as to HOW he’s wrong (which, incidentally, I don’t believe he is. Somehow I trust an engineer’s knowledge of the internet over a politician’s…)
Still, it’s good that this is starting to get some mainstream coverage, even if it didn’t really challenge Conroy too much.
As robbie swan points out in the comments:
When Conroy first flagged the filter, he was going to ban all material that was currently being put on the ACMA blacklist. That included federally classified X rated material then, and despite Conroy’s assertions that X rated material will not be filtered under the new proposals, X rated content is still being added to the ACMA blacklist today. Even if he keeps his word on this, he knows full well that 80% of adult material that is imported into Australia on DVDs has to be modified to make the strict guidelines of the Australian X category. So to say that X rated content will be legal under the filter, still means that 80% of the sexually explicit content on the web will be filtered, Adult content that does not make the Australian X rated category includes material where there is ‘assaultative language’. This means you can say ‘fuck me’ on an X rated film but ‘fuck you’ is often enough to push an X rated film into the dreaded Refused Classification (RC) rating. As for consenting B and D, foot fetish, small breasts, female ejaculation, tickling, mild spanking etc etc these will all be filtered under the new regime even though they are legal acts in themselves. He should just say that all legal acts will not be filtered.
Telstra's final report on the filter
And as someone pointed out in the comments.
The man in charge of the government internet policy here in Australia actually says during the interview that P2P bypasses the internet!!!
The man in charge of the government internet policy here in Australia actually says during the interview that P2P bypasses the internet!!!
