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A message to all Australians, are you out of your fuckin’ minds? - Australia’s Internet censorship
by Open-Publishing - Sunday 26 October 2008
By Chycho
A few days ago I came across the news that the Australian government was implementing plans for a no opt-out censored Internet. This will be a multi-million dollar project and will be “mandatory for all Australians”, which means that “Australians will be unable to opt-out of the government’s pending Internet content filtering scheme, and will instead be placed on a watered-down blacklist.”
If Australians allow this scheme to be implemented, then it means that they will be living under Totalitarianism, a political system where a “state regulates nearly every aspect of public and private life.” This is the same type of regime that the Soviet Union functioned as, maintaining itself “in political power by means of an official all-embracing ideology and propaganda disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that controls the state, personality cults, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of free discussion and criticism, the use of mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror tactics.”
This explains why Colin Jacobs, chair of the online users’ lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia said: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that this model involves more technical interference in the internet infrastructure than what is attempted in Iran, one of the most repressive and regressive censorship regimes in the world.”
Are you, Australians, out of your minds to allow this to happen? Don’t you understand what this means? I’m guessing that you don’t know what the implications of this really are, since you haven’t stopped it yet, so let’s look at the economic aspects, maybe this will wake you up.
The Internet is the lifeline for innovation, period. If you need further explanation of this than maybe you deserve a censored Internet, I just hope that you do not set an example that the rest of the world follows.
I’ve said this before but I will say it again:
Question: What is the difference between Australia censoring the Internet and China or North Korea censoring the Internet?
Answer: Absolutely nothing.
If censorship of the Internet is allowed to take place in Australia, then it will set a precedence and other Western countries will soon follow. It is extremely important that Australians prevent this from happening, but if it does happen, I personally would get the hell out of Australia ASAP, especially since “Internet providers and the government’s own tests have found that presently available filters are not capable of adequately distinguishing between legal and illegal content and can degrade internet speeds by up to 86 per cent.”