So Conroy and the Rudd Government are planning on introducing mandatory net censorship in Australia as early as this year. This will potentially knock tens of thousands of sites off the Internet which would be otherwise legal to view.
There’s two main problems with this: Firstly the Australian classification system is broken and completely irrelevant in an Internet era (but that’s another story,) and secondly now that Conroy has dug himself so deep into this policy, it would kill his career should he actually listen to reason and drop it.
My solution to the second problem is as follows:
Optional, Opt-In Child Filtering
The current scheme is a blanket censorship proposal which will apply to homes and businesses alike. It is highly inefficient and demonstrably flawed in almost every way. The government has admitted it won’t even attempt to protect children from content on-line, it’s a token gesture because by design it will miss the vast majority of content it will try to block, and it’s an exceedingly expensive tool to boot.
The solution is not to proceed with the broken policy that the majority of experts have decried. Rather, the solution is to have a opt-in reduced risk child Internet experience that’s owned and operated by the government itself. That is more true to the original policy, and that is what the Australian people (arguably) voted for.
The irony of this is this idea is that it’s already been done. The minister himself decided to axe it when he saw how very few people were actually interested, but to save face in light of such extremely poor judgement it would be feasible to implement the very same thing, just using dedicated hardware and DNS poisoning instead.
OpenDNS… But Better
OpenDNS has been running this kind of thing for a while now. Once the user sets up the DNS servers in their router the entire home Internet connection uses these servers to get addresses for web pages as they ask for them. If the option is enabled, any non-child-friendly sites are poisoned and redirected to the OpenDNS site instead, where a nice reminder not to be naughty appears on the screen.
This is very similar to what the Rudd Government was originally proposing except that instead of every single Australian ISP needing to do it themselves, it’s centralised in one location. The current policy is a fool’s errand, and the Government should put it’s money where it’s mouth is and do it’s own dirty work.
While political hacks like Conroy — driven by the Australian Christian Lobby — are claiming that Australia voted for exactly this, the truth is a little more confused. As Kate Lundy recently found out, many people weren’t aware or misunderstood this policy at the last election. At some point the “offer” of a “clean” Internet feed to “children” has turned into a mandatory, measurably ineffective tool for every Australian, which is not only an obscene policy shift but also completely different to what was proposed at the last election.
So that’s why this solution is so elegant. The Government can run their own in-house censorship machine and at the same time do a more efficient job of actually protecting children.
The benefit of this solution is that it makes it orders of magnitude easier to opt-in. Visit www.the-government-should-look-after-my-children-for-me.com and click “filter inappropriate content from my internet,” and the site will automatically lodge a request with the ISP. The ISP then puts that user in a pool whose modems are configured to send requests the Government’s DNS servers, and hey presto; after being kicked off the ‘net for thirty seconds while all this takes place, you now have a filtered Internet connection. No muss, no end-user fuss.
Unfortunately the current proposal doesn’t even offer an opt-out any more, so it’s difficult to come up with fair and reasonable alternatives to the scheme.
Reasons Things Won’t Change
The reason this scenario will never eventuate is entirely political. It seems the Australian Christian Lobby, Senator Steve Fielding, and a small number of vocal individuals with a vested interest are driving to push this policy through.
It’s an entirely sticky issue, because despite the original policy Senator Conroy is no longer interested in protecting children at all. There’s a highly intelligent analysis of the Government’s comments on the issue at libertus.net, which outlines how differently the policy is shaping up compared to the 2007 election promise, but essentially it’s a complete backflip on what was originally proposed. Indeed, one could consider the promise broken based on what Minister Conroy is saying today because it doesn’t involve protecting children whatsoever.
Ideally there should be peer reviewed studies into how and what – if anything — should actually be censored off the Internet before we spend such a massive amount of money, but the Rudd Government to date seems content to implement knee-jerk policy based on speculation alone. The current policy will have no measurable benefits whatsoever and unless something changes fast, we’re going to be footing the bill for this system to permeate our digital infrastructure and weigh down every packet with superfluous political protocol.