I don’t those who are anti-filter/anti-censorship come close to the evangelicals in terms of political organisation, but with any luck we can find a way of doing things that works for us.

@Syd Walker: When you say…

[Conroy] set up a blog, got a squillion comments in a day and closed it down because of excessive interest.

… that’s not quite true. It was always intended to be a short-term trial to see what happened. He certainly did get a squillion comments though!

The lesson they learned is that while they, the government, may have wanted to talk about other things, the citizens still had far too much pent-up frustration about the lack of meaningful dialog on Internet censorship and wanted to talk about that. A clear indication of how far out of touch Conroy’s office is with “the mood of the people”.

@Sam D: Indeed, Clive Hamilton on this issue is nothing but bluster and rhetoric.

There’s nothing wrong, in and of itself, with Jim Wallace and his Australian Christian Lobby asking people to get involved in the political process. It’s no different from, say, GetUp! asking its members to do the same. This is how we motive each other to take part in politics.

It only gets dodgy when people aren’t accurately informed about what they’re supporting — for example, Wallace’s and Hamilton’s continual misleading descriptions of the government’s plans — or when participants don’t accurately identify themselves or their affiliations.

Someone wrote somewhere recently that the socially-conservative evangelical churches just happen to be very good at this kind of political organisation.

Forgive me for being repetitious as I say this every opportunity that I can get, but (as far as I know) Clive Hamilton has NEVER had any of his opinions on pornography or filtering published in a peer-reviewed journal or similar. From an academically rigorous angle, this should set off the alarm bells.

I tutor in media ethics at university, and I wouldn’t accept one of his rants for marking as an assessment due to lack of references, evidence and justification. Hell, I wouldn’t even let my students use him as a reference, for those same reasons.

Clearly standards at CAPPE are not as high as they would have us at the non G8 uni’s believe.

He set up a blog, got a squillion comments in a day and closed it down because of excessive interest.

The rest of us aren’t in the same league.

See http://www.dbcde.gov.au/communications_for_business/industry_development/digital_economy/future_directions_blog/topics/we_hear_you?

On another note, does it amuse anyone else that so-called “super-blogger” Hamilton doesn’t actually have, y’know, a blog?

I don’t have anything constructive to add to the debate, just a rambling disgust brought on by my frustration in seeing how blinkered our society is still willing to be and how contolled they are by fear.

“It seems Australian IT doesn’t want my comment.”·

Mine neither. Although it admittedly mostly echoed the sentiments of other commentators: Straw men. Hypothetical boy deliberately bypassing ‘adult content’ warnings and other measures designed to prevent him from accessing such sites. Parental responsibility. Importance of encouraging open communication between children and responsible adults, etc.

If Hamilton were merely ignorant or incompetent, that would seriously undermine his position. You’d have to wonder how he could hold down an academic position. Yet he appears to be neither of those things, as his well-researched and widely-acclaimed writings in other fields demonstrate.

He decries “the extreme libertarians [sic] and ISP executives who dominate the debate”, and yet it’s clear that those participating at the deepest level are neither of those things. He would seem to be demanding a “broader” debate, and yet isn’t “debating” himself. He merely re-works the same missive, pronouncing it from the masthead of The Australian and ABC News and Crikey, and then ignoring the responses.

It’s a very old-fashioned way of doing business. Wrap yourself in the trappings of authority — an academic title, a respected media masthead — and make Pronouncements. In this environment he’d feel in control, and it’s not for nothing that Bronwen Clune calls the industrial-age media control media. Hamilton would doubtless fear being in an open forum because he wouldn’t be in control.

Control…

I’m re-reading the opening paragraphs of his rant with that in mind, and everything takes on a very different light.

@ALloyd: Thanks for re-posting that here. It does seem that The Australian has stopped posting comments — though that may just be because they haven’t done their moderation yet.

While ISPs provide connectivity rather that hosting, many businesses do offer both services and brand themselves ISPs. While your point is valid, I suspect it’s too subtle to be used as part of this debate.

The Net may not belong to libertarians. But it doesn’t belong to scaremongering totalitarians like Clive Hamilton either. The key phrase in Mr. Hamilton’s ludicrous slippery slope argument is this:

He types in a search for, say, ‘sex pictures’.

In other words, the hypothetical boy got exactly what he asked for. As Trent points out, Mr. Hamilton’s example shows a complete disregard for the responsibilities of parents and individual moral responsibility. The web is an encyclopaedic resource — do we supervise children whilst they flick through the pages, or just tear out the bits we don’t agree with in case they get hold of it when we aren’t looking?

I find it revealing that despite the unquestionable moral evil of the examples cited by Mr. Hamilton, very few (with the exception of bestiality) are illegal under Australian law. Despite his protestations, what he is in effect asking for is a double standard, with the Internet being more tightly restricted than other equivalent media.

Software already exists to allow parents to regulate what their children can access on the Internet, and comes pre-loaded on many modern operating systems. These systems aren’t infallible, but neither are our society’s precautions to prevent pornographic magazines or films falling into the hands of minors. What Mr. Hamilton is effectively asking is that we ban all media not rated G.

Whether he understands this is another matter — he certainly doesn’t seem to understand how the Internet works, as evinced by this inane comment:

…we have laws banning Australian ISPs from hosting the kinds of pornographic imagery I have described above, which all come from overseas sites…

Internet Service Providers, of course, do not ‘host’ anything. The imagery in question, is hosted on the aforementioned “overseas” sites. ISPs are utility providers. They exist to deliver access to the Internet, which is an international network. The filtering system Mr. Hamilton is describing is a secret list of sites which are surreptitiously INTERCEPTED and made unavailable when requested by the Australian user. A “page not found” error message will be displayed, giving the impression the content does not exist. This is supposedly to prevent owners of illegal sites realising they are being blocked and simply switching to another host. However, because the list of blocked sites is kept secret (for the same reason) there is absolutely no accountability and nothing at all to prevent these crypto-government organisations censoring anything they want.

Mr. Hamilton would no doubt accuse me of ‘scare-mongering’ for this, but the fact is it’s already begun. In the UK the Internet Watch Foundation caused uproar recently when it banned, not just an image, but an entire article on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in the process accidentally blocking the entire country from editing the site. When Wikipedia produced an article on the controversy (without the offending image) they blocked that, too. The fact that the IWF felt enabled not just to censor the Internet, but censor all reference to their censorship, should give pause to anyone seeking to promote such a scheme in Australia.

To restate: Ample software solutions exist to enable individual families to restrict what their children can do online. Anything else is ultimately destructive to free speech and the liberty of the Australian citizen.

The really sad thing is that in the past he’s had some interesting things to say about a variety of issues. Articles like this really devalue everything he’s written. If he’s this non-rational and clearly misinformed on this subject[*], how can I take anything he says at face value, without sitting down and spending time checking what else he has wrong.

[*] This is of course assuming he’s not knowingly arguing in bad faith. I haven’t seen any reason to believe so, but this latest piece of ranting has me seriously wondering.