[Upd-discuss] From Australia re Debate on Regulating Internet Stuff

[Seth Johnson]

> http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8098


The perplexing Internet debate


By Mark Newton

posted Thursday, 30 October 2008


Ever since public computer networks burst onto the scene in the
1980's, the subject of online content regulation has been a
controversial one.

Successive governments of all stripes have considered the issue, and
largely looked upon the free-ranging exchange of networked content
with disapproval, if not outright disdain. Nearly 20 years ago the
Senate Select Committee into Online Services produced a frightening
raft of predictions about the societal decay that'd naturally extend
from the public's exposure to material common in the BBS (Bulletin
Board System) world, and various repetitions of the effort have drawn
the same conclusions ever since.

Unfortunately for the censorship advocates, our own experience tells
us that all the predictions of doom, destruction and despair have been
wrong.

We've now experienced 20 years of ubiquitous access to the Internet,
and have brought up a whole generation of jacked-in kids, who have
grown up into responsible parents themselves.

These people are completely comfortable with the Internet, having
grown up using Google to assist with their physics homework, keeping
in touch with their friends all over the world with email, exchanging
happy-snaps of their holidays on blogs and Facebook, and inhaling
information from the inexhaustible reservoir of sometimes crass, but
often invaluable content on the World Wide Web.

The Australian public has acclimatised themselves to the Internet, and
adapted both their lives and the network itself to suit their
lifestyles. Australian parents are comfortable with the Internet,
barring some background-radiation levels of anxiety, quelled by means
of a straightforward dose of supervision and PC filtering software. In
a world which has featured nearly three decades of uncensored access
to online services, to advocate for handing it over to government
control is a radical position.

Which is why this latest resurrection of the online censorship debate
is so perplexing.

When Senator Alston last raised the issue in 1999, the Internet was
still a scary place that hardly anyone had experienced. Nobody in
Australia had seen a URL on a bus ad, or posted their baby videos on
YouTube. It was easy to stir up "moral panic" about Internet content
because hardly anyone knew what it was, and the speakers with the
loudest megaphones were the politicians doing the stirring.

But in 2008? Not so much.

Senator Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the
Digital Economy, has brought the issue up again, and much to his
apparent surprise it doesn't seem to be tracking as well as it has in
the past.

Not only does everyone know that the Internet isn't frightening or
uncontrollable; not only do the population's own experiences clash
with the Minister's hysterical allusions to unrestricted access to
child pornography; but, much to the Minister's apparent astonishment,
he doesn't even have the loudest voice anymore.

In the past, politicians have been able to shut-down debate by casting
McCarthyist slurs which compare opponents to child pornographers: but
when Mr Conroy used the same tactic in Senate Estimates on October 20,
the blogosphere's incredulous ridicule seeped through into the
commercial media, yielding headlines about the Minister's disgraceful
debasement of the public discourse.

In the past, politicians have been able to monopolise the debate by
having disproportionate access to media. Not so for Mr Conroy, who has
been so thoroughly discredited by the controversy that his press
office has refused to comment to media outlets since October 24, while
the new media represented by the blogosphere is atwitter with
fulminating dissent.

In the past, politicians have had message-control; but this time it's
different, with the online community pre-empting the Minister with
their own talking points, their own arguments, their own technical and
financial analyses, and boundless quantities of embarrassing ridicule
on the Minister's position. The Minister has been caught flat-footed
without a response, and, as reported by Asher Moses in The Age on
October 24, his first and most public reaction has been to try to
silence my opposing political views by exercising inappropriate
political pressure on my employer.

Every broken promise is coming under scrutiny. Every debating point is
being disassembled and debunked. Every piece of emotional extremist
rhetoric emanating from the Minister's office is being deconstructed
for political jargon, turned around, and aimed right back at its
originator. And new supporters who join the Minister, such as Family
First and Senator Nick Xenophon on October 27, are instantly
associated with the same criticisms.

The online community's argument is a simple one:

    * there's no problem to solve because actual illegal 
      material on the Internet is so rare that nobody ever 
      finds it;

    * even if there was a problem to solve, there's no 
      serious public demand to solve it;

    * even if there was a public demand to solve it, none of 
      the solutions proposed by the ALP will be effective, 
      and the Government has handily provided original 
      research to decimate their own case;

    * even if they were effective, they'll slow down 
      Internet access and reduce Internet reliability, as 
      shown by the same original research released by the 
      Minister on July 22;

    * even if the proposed solutions had perfect performance 
      and reliability, none of them are affordable;

    * even if they were affordable, they'll be implemented 
      terribly by the same underclass of bureaucrat that 
      deemed Mohammad Haneef a terrorist, or Bill Henson a 
      pornographer. The salivating of hangers-on like Family 
      First and Nick Xenophon, lobbying to have the 
      blacklist expanded before it's even in force, 
      demonstrate perfectly how open the system will be to 
      political manipulation and lobbying;

    * even if they were implemented perfectly by perfect 
      administrators, the blacklists will inevitably leak, 
      be published on the Internet, whereupon they'll fall 
      into the hands of nefarious individuals and 
      consequently enable child abuse all over the world, 
      with the direct assistance of the Commonwealth of 
      Australia; and

    * there's no possibility that the blacklists won't leak. 
      Finland's list has already leaked, CyberPatrol's 
      encrypted blacklist is cracked every six months or so. 
      It's delusional to believe that Australia will be any 
      better at securing its officially sanctioned list of 
      Child Porn and Terrorism sites than anyone else. It 
      might take a month, a year, five years, ten years, or 
      two hours. But it will leak, secrets always do. 
      Pressing it into service will be like setting a 
      ticking time bomb, and when it explodes there'll be a 
      thronging multitude of critics pointing at Senator 
      Conroy and saying, "I told you so, you were warned, 
      but you did it anyway".

This isn't a complicated argument. To justify the ALP's policy,
cogent, successful arguments against each and every one of those
independent points will need to be mounted.

The Minister's behaviour isn't likely to encourage the production of
such arguments. Aside from the four days of "radio silence" coming
from his department post October 24, we've seen him malign critics by
accusing them of "speculating" about details he's refused to provide,
label proponents of these entirely reasonable arguments as "extremist
lobby groups", and attack his questioners by comparing them to child
pornographers.

While it'd be nice to pretend that we could have a grown-up discussion
about these issues, the topic's political history doesn't lend much
hope.

Is this time going to be different?