Thursday, September 24, 2009

"Clean-Feed'

What is the 'Clean Feed'?

"The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access.
Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home." (ref:
http://nocleanfeed.com/)

From what I can gather, the govt has pretty much kept the details under wraps about how they will proceed with this notion. So it seems a lot of people feel like they are being left in the dark about the technicalities of it all. People are in uproar as there seem to be more than a few issues with clean feed. Including, technical issues (where they will draw the line), free speech concerns and its bad policy.

Honestly, I believe like most things, they have got it wrong. It might seem great on paper, but when put into action, I don't believe it will be effective. Nor will the govt be able to implement it completely (ie. hackers will get smarter and will only bypass it). It will never be 100% effective. Yes, it is a good idea, to keep children from harms way, but they are not just talking about children, more like the entire population. So where will it end? How old do you have to reach before you can fully have your freedom and the right to do so as you please?


What place does censorship have in democracy???
It has no place, democracy is the right for everyone to have a say. If the government censored the biggest information provider in the world, it would be a huge hypocracy.

I believe censorship is hard in a democratice society. I understand the reason in which some people think that it is a major benefit, in keeping children safe from what they are able to see online, but it's not really realistic. There are already parental monitoring programs available for parents to download or purchase and install on their home computers for their families safety. To me, the things that people do, write, produce for online material, is personal expression. To take aaway that right is not a democracy at all.

Cencorship has always been a problem in the past. For example books. There are a number of well written amazing books which have been banned in schools around the world as the education systems deem then to be inappropriate. But I've read the list and half the books on that list are not even that bad. Some of my favourite books I had read in my own time when I was in high school are on the list of the top100 banned books in America for the school system.

So while I do think that censorhip has its place, it only really works in theory. Like a lot of things, I mean communism, in theory, seems like the best way to run a country whereby all individuals are equal. But when applied to real life, eg. Russia and China, the theory fails dramatically. You can not account for people, their own individualism and corruption. It's just too hard and too broad. Censorship will always have its critics.

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