Internet censorship

Apparently the Government intends bringing in a law which will filter internet content at the ISP address. I’m not exactly sure what they intend filtering, although I presume it is aimed at porn and other unsavoury topics - in other words being a super nanny when parents can’t be bothered. Whether it is also a sneaky way of stopping politically sensitive information that the Government doesn’t want us to know about is uncertain but it does make me wonder why it is necessary to do this.

I am against censorship and believe it is up to the individual to do the right thing. Unfortunately censorship, like locks, only stops the law abiding. The criminals/paedophiles/terrorists will still be able to access whatever they want. The trouble is censorship has been used in the past to limit information that Governments themselves might dislike. Think of Hitler, The Eastern Block, China, Taliban etc. Do we really want to join that list? (Would an Australian Government ever do anything like that??? Is the truth really out there Mulder?) So, even though I abhor some of the things that can be found on the internet and some of the things people do with it, I don't access such information, so problem solved for me.

It is easy to inadvertently find the wrong information on the Net, but this will still slip through regardless of the walls put in place to stop it. I remember when a colleague and I were looking for pictures of French National Costume for a school project and ended up on some very "interesting" sights. - Little maids costumes, frilly handcuffs. You get the idea. Recently, while listening to a lady talking about Britannica Online I was told how her nephew, researching the First World War, put in the search option “pictures of privates” meaning soldiers. I'll leave it to you to imagine what sort of pictures he got. So, even innocent searches can bring up unwanted results. Would they be filtered out at the ISP level? On the reverse side - how many innocent searches will be banned because the filter picks up words like sextant and bans them because it recognises the word sex. That sort of pedantry has worked against me in the past.

Besides, what is right and what is wrong is in the eye of the beholder. I remember the old lady who threw an Agatha Christie book on the desk and said it was the most disgusting book she had ever read. There was a talkback radio host once talking about books and a woman rang to say she had just read a really filthy book. He told her not to mention the title on the radio because everyone would want to read it. Was it as bad as Harold Robbins? The caller said she had never read Harold Robbins so he told her to do so and ring him back and tell him what he thought. A little while later he mentioned that the woman had told him that her filthy book was David Niven's "The Moon is a Balloon". "And I've told her to go and read Harold Robbins" he laughed.

A newspaper columnist wrote that he was reading Portnoy’s Complaint on the ferry when that book was popular. The book had been doing the rounds of the Office and someone had covered the book in brown paper. He couldn’t understand why everyone was openly smirking at him until he looked at the cover and found that someone had written “Little Women” on the front.

I always believed that banning a book or a film only made people determined to read or see said book or movie just to see why it was banned. I can remember Mum telling me she read “Love me Sailor” simply because it had been banned during the war and she wanted to know why. I suppose there was also that little twinge of guilty daring as well. This did not apply to the Zane Grey novel that her stepmother burned because said stepmother thought it was a dirty book. Zane Grey would turn in his grave.

How many people read and were bored to tears by Rushdie’s Satanic Versus simply because the Ayatollah put a price of the author’s head?

I think many people, who would not otherwise do something, will do it simply because they have been told not to and this is the major flaw in censorship.

I hope the Government re-thinks this proposed policy and give people the ability to do the right thing. Let adults be adults and parents actually be parents.