John Linton
I haven't seen this reported in the local press so maybe its just happened - I noticed it on the TV BBC World News (banner headlines under the main picture) earlier this morning as I was checking through the on line news. So I have no details and no idea of what it means or how it's to be implemented. (I'm assuming that the BBC World News is a factual service).
I'm not sure when censorship of such things finally disappeared from Australia in terms of books, magazines, movies etc but I would guess at the final remnants disappearing in the 1980s or around that time so why, some 25 years later does such a thing rear its head again?
I understand that Indonesia is a Muslim State with leanings towards Sharia style attitudes to a range of issues so censorship in such a society may well have a more widespread support level than in, say, a country like Australia. Apart from the, I would say almost overwhelming, difficulties of putting in place some sorts of automated restriction of "X" rated web sites what is the point in the 21st Century?
In Indonesia, or perhaps in many similar countries around the world, perhaps the ways such censorship can be implemented will not have to rely on technology but by a more intrusive policing of individuals that cannot possibly be put in place in so called 'liberal democracies'. (sometimes I wonder if there would be no theft in Australia if people convicted of theft had their right hands cut off? - makes you wonder what the Indonesans might do to people they deem to have infringed their new pornography laws?).
The Crazy Kevin/Simpleton Stevie version of this wowserism is about to be inflicted on all Australians in some unknown form in 'the near future' according to continuing reports from Canberra. As even those two twinks won't consider using the AFP or any other law enforcement agency to invade Australian homes and offices to enforce whatever it is they come up with they are faced with the sheer impossibility of implementing some infrastructure control methodology to eliminate access to whatever they define to be unsuitable material.
While the hot money is on attempting to enforce their idealistic nonsense via draconian impositions on Australia's ISPs even they will have to come to the realisation that it is impossible to implement even if it could somehow be afforded - any costing I can contemplate is horrendous for an ISP of Exetel's size.
But it begs the question of how do you 'police' a society that determines its own 'entertainment' in the private confines of its own 'locked bedroom'? Something Australian society, and the rest of the 'free world' decided some decades ago - it's not a government decision.
So now - turn the clocks back - but just how far back and to what sort of totalitarian State? The justification will be for the elimination of "child pornography", because no-one in their right mind would ever argue that a society's children must be protected in every way possible from the terminally sick, diseased and depraved minds and worse of that human detritus that preys sexually on children.
No-one would raise any objection to any realistic, or even slightly unrealistic, effort to rid the world of paedophiles. I certainly wouldn't either as a private citizen or as someone with shares in an ISP. The issue will always remain on how you 'control' an entity (the internet) which has been built from day one on the basis it must not be capable of being controlled (remember the initial premise for the internet was to build a communications structure that would still operate in the event of worldwide nuclear war!).
I really hope there is someone/some group of people who are far brighter than I am who can come up with a way to do that.
My fear, as someone with shares in an ISP, is that those idiots will produce an anti-paedophile scheme that's as impossible as their high speed broadband to 98% of Australians by 2009 - except in this instance Exetel will have to pay for their stupidity and constant tinkering until they abandon yet another of their pointlessly unrealistic grandstanding.