sw’as

Andrew Bartlett posts today at Crikey on the political prospects of The Greens as a third party in our ‘two party’ system. In his (always insightful) analysis he makes mention of the inevitable internal tensions about direction within the Greens over whether their effort to grow the party’s support base should focus on trying to consolidate “the more doctrinaire left wing vote” or “broaden their appeal to capture some of the ’small l’ liberal^[1] vote that the Democrats^[2] used to get.”

The Australian Democrats are in a hard place right now, but I for one, hope we haven’t seen the last of them. For me the Democrats have represented (and still do represent) a level of rationality in policy formation that we simply don’t see from the big parties. I also feel they’ve fought hard over many years to improve democracy in Australia, especially in regards to the under-representation many sections in Australian society^[3] experience.

But getting back on topic, Mike over at STOTC has been hard at work trawling through Hansard looking for any evicence that someone, anyone, in the halls of power might be paying attention to Labor’s diabolical plans to censor the internet - hopefully with a view to stopping them. It turns out Greens senator Scott Ludlam is paying attention and he’s even asking most of the right questions^[4]. Mike has picked out the juicy parts (as in, the really, really, horrifyingly bad parts) of what Senator Conroy had to say in reply. My favourite^[5] part is when Senator Conroy assumes:

I am sure I have unfortunately probably seen a wider range of commentary than you have, Senator Ludlam.

It’s possible, sure, but does that mean you automatically know better, Senator? It was disappointing to see the reports confirmed as fact that under their plans it will not be possible to completely opt out of a filtered internet.

As I said, we are in the early stages. But we are looking at two tiers-mandatory of illegal material and an option for families to get a clean feed service if they wish.

The standard line seemed to be “as I said, we are at the early stages.” I wouldn’t exactly call a live trial ‘early stages’; especially when the trials are likely to cost in the order of millions of dollars. I wonder who the unlucky customers will be.

1. That’s me. [↩]
2. That’s also me. [↩]
3. Reading recently about the New Zealand electoral system and their version of MMP, has only served to highlight just how just how inadequate I’m beginning to feel political representation is in Australia. [↩]
4. Maybe he’s on the side of broadening the Greens appeal and trying to capture some of that ’small l’ vote. [↩]
5. Again, favourite as in, OMG how could prominent and important members of our Government be so ignorant. [↩]

Last Friday night in a bar^[1] after a couple of Mojitos. A friend and I got to debating the perils of allowing this new-fangled internet to continue to grow out of control and exist, largely uncensored. I can’t believe this debate still needs to be had. Our debate was prompted by news of teenagers in Hyde Park doing something which started out fun and ended up ruined by some participants who were being stupid, really stupid, and the suggestion by some in the media that this was internet’s - or more specifically - Facebook’s fault^[2]. In the end, there were two prongs to our discussion. The first was about content filtering or censorship and the second was about the internet as an enabler of bad behaviour by groups of people in the real world. The main points of difference related to:

• who (if anyone) and how (if at all) the internet should be censored/monitored for bad^[3] content
• who should be held accountable for content on the internet which is bad, and
• who should be held accountable for bad behaviour somehow enabled by or amplified by the internet.

I find the idea that Facebook (or Myspace, or web hosts^[4], or web chat, or the internet, or the telephone, or <insert new technology of the day here>) should be held in anyway responsible for the bad behavior of its users simply unbelieveable. It seem to me that a good analogy for such a situation would be holding a building’s owner responsible for the independent actions - say, selling drugs or some other bad stuff - of their tentants.  Landlords do not, as far as I’m aware, have any responsibility to monitor the activities of their tenants, and in just the same way, web hosts - the internet’s landlords - should have no responsibility to monitor the activities of their tenants, the site owners/operators.

It is, of course, possible that a landlord, of their own accord or at the request of some authority, spots something they are suspicious of, or know to be bad. If there was a compelling reason to report this suspected bad behaviour or some obligation to provide further information about the suspected perpetrators which they refused or neglected to do, then there may be some cause to hold the landlord to account for that. But not because they’ve simply rented some space to someone who turned out to be the kind of person who would fail at their run on the egg-dicator^[5] should landlords be held responsible.

Censoring the internet on a large scale at some central point(s) is increadibly hard, and is generally a really bad idea. I don’t think there’s much disagreement that Chinas continued crippling of the internet is a bad thing. Why exactly the Australian Government^[6] (or any government for that matter) persists in making attempts to censor or filter the internet, despite clear evidence that it doesn’t work technically and no evidence that it does work as a tool for desireable^[7] social change is beyond me.

And worse than that, Stephen Conroy, the Communications Minister seems to be following in the steps of the previous, horribly technically ignorant Minister, Helen Coonan. As pointed out by tigtog at Hoyden About Town Senator Conroy has completely misrepresented a recent report into proposed ISP level internet filtering [PDF 2.8MB] representing it as ‘encouraging’. Get a more realistic analysis of the report courtesy of Crikey - Internet filters a success if success = failure.

It turns out this post has an unfortunate lack of focus, but I just had to get that off my chest.

1. The best time and place for a debate. [↩]
2. The implication being, of course, that any similar ’social networking’ style site could be substituted. [↩]
3. The term ‘bad’ used throughout this post is obviously ridiculously subjective. Lets assume, for the sake of argument that something bad is that which will almost certainly result in personal harm (psychological or physical) to someone somewhere. [↩]
4. As opposed to site owners/operators. [↩]
5. In the golden goose room, what is the name of the device that tells the good eggs from the bad eggs? [↩]
6. Both the previous Liberal Government and the current Labor Governement. [↩]
7. Desirable by who anyway? [↩]