This might be my bias. I’ve written elsewhere that I think contemporary politics has gone beyond one-dimensional Left vs Right analysis, even when it’s dressed up as Socialism vs Capitalism or most other -isms. Plus I have trouble assigning intent to abstract concepts. YMMV.

More recent statements suggest that he doesn’t so much mean “blocking” BitTorrent in the sense of a firewall, but “attacking” it in the sense of “being able to do something about it”. This may not solely be a technical system — and indeed the mistake that critics often make is to think that everything has to be technological.

For examples, Brilliant Digital Entertainment’s Global File Registry stores hashes of the files of copyrighted material which are being traded on P2P networks. The copyright-holder’s people join the networks, watch for the files being traded, and record the IP addresses of the participants — and they issue infringement notices to the ISPs. BDE have been touting this as a way of detecting the transmission of child abuse material.

Of course there are a number of flaws to this plan, but I’ll leave explication of those for others for now.

I await the Internet Transport Reform (Dangerous Packets) Act 2012.

[Senator Conroy's term] “euthanasia websites” is vague and misleading terminology which misrepresents Commonwealth law: the Criminal Code Amendment (Suicide Related Material Offences) Act 2005. That legislation does not make websites “illegal”, it criminalises use of a carriage service (telecommunications/Internet) for specified purposes with specified intent, and it does not prohibit use of a carriage service to engage in public discussion or debate about euthanasia or suicide; or advocate reform of the law relating to euthanasia or suicide; unless the person has specified intent beyond such discussion/advocacy. Refer to the Act for details.

It would however be very concerning if ACMA were to start applying the criteria in that Act, rather than a court of criminal law as intended by the Parliament. It is not known whether that is the Labor Government’s intent in relation to its filtering/blocking plan.

So Ian Woolf is slightly wrong. It’s not an MA15+ classification issue but a “use of communications carriage service” issue. Either way, the existence of this illegal material on an overseas site can now, already, cause it to be added to the ACMA blacklist.

Your suggestion that if the government abuses the censorship then we can vote them out or protest it. But by then the abuse will have already happened. With a secretive censorship regime — and remember that the ACMA blacklist is both secret and protected by special FOI legislation — we’d have to: find out that the censorship is, in fact happening; successfully vote out the government when there may well be other political issues that sway the vote in other directions; make sure the new government actually repeals the legislation; and so on. My risk assessment is that we don’t give them that power in the first place.

There’s nothing wrong with a government having power X per se, but only if there are appropriate checks and balance, appeals processes and so on. Conroy’s plan has none of these things.

My analogy: We can give someone a gun, and hope they don’t misuse it. If they do misuse it, you say, we can always take the gun back. But by then they’ve already shot someone, and they still have a gun that makes my bargaining… difficult. I say don’t give them the gun to start with.

One point you’re missing when you say Conroy’s plan brings the Internet “in line with the rest of the media” isn’t actually true.

With, say, a TV program that’s MA15+ it still goes to air — just tagged as such and after 9.30pm, and parents can decide whether to allow their children to watch it. A cinema showing an MA15+ film doesn’t let in 10yo kids but anyone 15 or older is free to go in.

With the censorship of the Internet reducing the entire internet to MA15+, then no-one gets to see the perfectly-legal material, adult or child. This is a fundamental difference. Even if such a system is opt-out, it still requires you to register in some way to view perfectly legal material. That’s a significant change being able to view it unmonitored.

Bush and Howard bring in new laws (phone tapping, detention, etc) and blame it on terriorism. Your arguing don’t bring in regulations as there is a chance of government abusing it.

Now you over look the fact that if a government did that:
a) They would/could be voted out
b) You could protest it!

So again, if this is the case, its the Net being brought in line with the rest of media and again if you have an issue with the underlying classification argue that not that the net should have different rules.

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/bsa1992214/sch7.html

Do you see that your using the Howard/Bush terrorism is bad argument against the Filter?

Nope, you’ve lost me there. Care to spell out the steps in more detail?

As for trusting the government, as I say, it’s also about trusting all potential future governments. Things can change rapidly in only a decade or two. Mentioning German, Italy and Japan in this context is a cliché, but nevertheless true. Maybe those with better History than me could suggest less-obvious examples.