Stephen Conroy: Internet villian

Someone on the PAL Gamer Network dug up a quote that I found quite true to this situation:

"As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation."

-Adolf Hitler

One thing that has bothered me in recent years is Australia's reputation of being a "live and let live, I don't care" sort of persona. It doesn't bother me because that's a bad attitude to have, quite frankly I think that's the best thing about this country. It bothers me because politicians with a minority of baby boomer wowsers are doing everything they can to skull fuck that reputation and insist on treating grown adults like a bunch of children who cant tell right from wrong and insist they make these decisions for you.

Stephen Conroy is one such politician, insisting on deciding what you can and cant view in the Internet is his dayjob. What does this have to do with games? Well I was given a great excuse to put this on the blog when I found out that he insists on blocking websites that sell or make freely available anything that doesn't fit Michael Atkinson's draconian 15+ or banned regime.

"This is the worst Communications Minister we've had in the 15 years since the Internet industry has existed."

- Michael Malone, Managing Director at iiNet

Now this just gives me an excuse to put the Internet filter topic in this blog, but I want to dig into the censorship filter itself. First of all they either need voluntary cooperation from the industry or legislation to get this filter up. The ISP's have expressed this filter is terrible from both ethical and technological grounds. Meaning its impossible, unworkable and immoral.

As far as legislation goes, they need the senate to pass it, the Liberal Party are being uncharacteristicly liberal for a change and opposing the filter, and the greens are against it too, so if Labor want to pass it they need Steve Feilding from Family First and the independent Senator Nick Xenophon who were both for it originally however they have both changed their minds. Xenophon came to his senses and realised this opens up the door for alot more than just blocking websites hosting child porn (I am on the mindset a filter would just make paedophiles harder to catch anyways). Feilding says he likes it in principle but has realised its unworkable. So even if Feilding changes his mind Xenephon has withdrew all support making the filter effectively dead.

Have these 2 come to their senses? Have they saved us from draconian censorship?

As far as the web filter goes, its been documented by anybody with any sort of technical competence that it wont work, and personally I would be even more worried if it did. Back to the game related stuff, what happens to MMO's? They are totally online and therefore not rated by the Australian Censor regime known as the OFLC. All it really takes is one person to do something anywhere in the world off the mark and AMCA could effectively pull the plug on World of Warcraft if it saw fit (they are not answerable to anybody).

They also plan to block sites that sell copies of games that are banned for sale in Australia as well. Last time I checked, forcing companies to change their practices to suit your law, even if they don't exist in your country is a practice only done by the likes of China and Iran (in fact only countries with terrible censorship reputations actually have a filter to begin with). So sites like PlayAsia get blocked, which sucks because I order alot of games from there (the markup's here are ridiculous, I will only support local industry when it starts supporting me (by offering decent prices).

Don't worry, we haven't forgotten about you. This just makes you geek enemy #2.

Another thing these politicians have forgotten about, its only illegal to sell them in Australia, not own. Even Atkinson has dismissed it as not a big deal if you want it bad enough, nothing stopping you from importing it. Well there will be if the filter goes ahead, but lets just hoping the only thing that Conroy achieves out of this is the prestigious Internet Villian Award. I personally have no issues with my taxpayer money flying him up to the UK to accept it.

I could go on and on about both the R18+ issue plus the firewall issue but I think that can do it for now. I may revisit the R18+ thing another time, and the firewall issue if I ever get round to doing a more politics based blog.