Censorship of the Internet
The three supposed wise monkeys said - hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil. But who wants to be classed as a monkey, or a goat for that matter? And now, the monkeys in society want to add an extra dimension to their saying... cyber no evil. The Internet is indeed an unparalleled information medium. The topic of this discussion lies in the unregulated flow of this information and the concerns it has created with parents and government organisations. Our feelings about Internet censorship are quite simple. We, and I speak for the majority of the online community, not just for the Freedom of Information Association, don't want a bar of it. Not the ignorant, draconian, and purblind criminal sanctions of the United States Communications Decency Act or the Australian Attorneys-General; nor a bureaucratic morass of codes of conduct and complaints tribunals administered by the Australian Broadcasting Authority. We oppose even self-regulation, if that is to mean the enforcement by Internet users and administrators of rules imposed on us by governments. The global village that is the Internet has its own rules and its own methods of enforcing them - rules and sanctions which have been developed over the decades of the Net's exi
This can only be described as a dismal failure - the material in question is more widely available now than ever and received most unfortunate publicity as a result of the affair. There is an old saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The technological reasons include the sheer volume of data traffic, the difficulty of analysing end to end traffic in the middle of a datagram network,and the existence of freely available military - grade encryption software. Or perhaps when carried out by governments an act of war. The idea of an Australian ratings service therefore is ridiculous, because variation in community standards is greater within countries than between them. Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought crime literally impossible because there will be no words with which to express it. Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. That is to take a technical perspective on the issue. It is our conviction, therefore, that there is no place for any form of censorship on the Internet. The reasons why this sort of Orwellian censorship can't work are both technological and sociological. The most effective response to this sort of material is either to ignore it or refute it. No centralised system can provide this flexibility.
Common topics in this essay:
Federal Court,
Broadcasting Authority,
Decency Act,
,
Kristul Decisions,
George Orwell's,
Australian Broadcasting,
Australian Attorneys-General,
Information Association,
George Orwell,
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communications decency,
australian broadcasting authority,
free speech,
censorship proper,
kinds information,
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community standards,
reasons include,
broadcasting authority,
australian broadcasting,
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Acceptance Essays
