In this essay I will focus on clean-feed. Should the Australian government impose censorship on the internet, or is freedom of speech more important? I will also discuss how the internet has changed the worlds community and how clean-feed will affect this.
So what is clean-feed? Clean-feed is a plan the Australian Federal Government has come up with to censor the internet for all Australians. There will be two filters, one opt-out filter for children witch includes all material that could be harmful or inappropriate for children and a filter that will censor all the illegal or unwanted websites. The problem is who is going to decide what should be censored and not, and is it fair that a few persons decides what is appropriate for you? A program will be set up to make this process go faster, this program can go through all your emails and personal things you have on the internet. What happened to privacy? This program will go trough millions of web pages and it would be impossible for it to filter out all the inappropriate sites and its impossible to not do any mistakes, most likely it will block sites that shouldn't be blocked. The government has already set up a trail version of this program. And it has already blocked out a site that should not be blocked. OMNIconnect chief technican, Gareme Lee said following to arnnet.com.au
"Some of the customers complained because the block list really hadn't been moderated well enough. One in particular was a site called Redtube.com The whole site had been blocked and it was just a standard pornography site"
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/312354/isps_give_clean_feed_filter_technical_green-light
With this mistake they lost a lot of volunteers, and only 1 present of Nelson Bay Online's customer base decided to try out the program. That means that 99% didn't want to participate in this trial version. Doesn't that tell the government that most Australians isn't interested in being censored on the internet?
History of the internet page 277
As you can see in this statistics the internet has grown tremendously from just 1993 - 1997. And its still growing and in 2008 it was around 156 million websites on the internet. This makes the World Wide Web the biggest community on earth. People from all over the world can communicate with each other in only seconds. Everyone can freely share there thoughts and opinions without any censorship. While internet grows, all the worlds cultures become more and more alike. With a big community like this you will find inappropriate things, and people who act badly. But this kind of things you will find in every community in the world. So should the government be able to limit what you can say on the internet? This is an ethical dilemma. Where should we draw the line? On one hand the government could stop some racist websites and other inappropriate web sites. But on the other hand we have the human rights.
"Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art of through any other media of his choice"
http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cpr.html#%2019.2
If the government starts using censorship they will brake the human rights. Should we let the government increase our rights of freedom of speech? Every one has the right to have different opinions and say what they want. And the government should not be allowed to limit this right. It will send us back in time. Should we really follow the footsteps of nations like China and North Korea?
Everyone can agree that it is a lot of things on the internet that shouldn't be there. Like for example child porn. But that is already illegal. So the clean-feed wouldn't help much. The government says we have to protect the children. But you can get a lot of different parent control programs for the internet. So its not need for any censorship here ether. Lets say the Australian government decided to use the clean-feed. Does the government really think that no Australian citizen would be able to find away around it? The cyberspace is so big that it would be impossible to control all of it. And with new proxy-sites being made everyday, it will always be a ways around.
The government does things that are in the wrong diraction, and other times in the right. The control over encryption has been a stupid thing they've been doing - you can't control encryption. The government has no benefot from controlling corporare or individual privacy as this point by saying you can't have it"
- Lawrence Roberts, cofather of the internet and chairman of Caspian Networks. (Future net, page 96)
sources:
1. http://nocleanfeed.com/
2. http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/?tag=cleanfeed
3. http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/312354/isps_give_clean_feed_filter_technical_green-light
4. http://www.labnol.org/internet/blogging/the-total-number-of-websites-on-earth/2257/
5. http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cpr.html#%2019.2
Books:
1. Title: Futurenet: The past, present, and future of the internet as told by its crators and visionaries.
Author: Sally Richards
Year of Publication: 2002
2. Title: Free speech and false profits: ethics in the media
Author: Ted Schwarz
Year of Publication: 1996
3. Title: Atlas of cyberspace
Author: Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin
Year of Publication: 2001
4. Title: Cybersociety: computer-mediated comminication and community
Author: Steven G. Jones
Year of Publication: 1995
5. Title: Computer media and communication
Author: Paul A Mayer
Year of Publication: 1999
