At face value the state of Tasmania is about to become a testing ground for keeping the Internet free of violent and pornographic content.
A conservative senator, Guy Barnett, has organized a trial in which Internet service providers (ISPs) will use filtering software from three different companies to prevent offensive content reaching any Web surfer in the small Australian island state.
This is the reverse of the current Australian situation, where ISPs provide free or non-profit access to optional content filters for customers concerned at the risk of their children being exposed to dangerous and depraved Web sites.
But problems have arisen.
Australia's two largest telephone and Internet companies, Telstra and Optus, have refused to take part, saying the country already has the world's best defenses against "Web nasties" especially those involving child pornography.
This means four in five Tasmanian families with Internet connections will not be involved in the experiment.
And one of the software firms, Internet Sheriff Technologies, says its main interest isn't so much in stopping pornography but demonstrating a filtering technology it might sell to Asia-Pacific nations with censorship laws and repressive controls over the flow of information that might inform or inflame political dissent.
Internet Sheriff's sales director Glen Phillips says ISPs in China were among his list of potential buyers, a market where US Internet technology giant Google has already controversially agreed to provide filters to gag sites not approved by Beijing from being accessed by its search engine.
However the three-month trial will still go ahead from July, much to the dismay of the Canberra-based Internet Industry Association which largely designed the current Australian system for curbing Internet content that puts children at risk.
The association's executive director Peter Coroneos, says trying to filter the Internet at the ISPs that provide connections to the world wide Web means slashing the actual speed of broadband by up four-fifths.
"Literally every item requested by the tens of thousands of subscribers who may be using the Web or doing their email at any moment in time will have to be run through computational filters looking for rude words, obscene images, or banned links to known pornographic sites," says Coroneos.
"The consequences for Internet commerce, personal correspondence and all of the other things for which the Internet has become such an essential tool will be compromised badly for a goal which is actually technically impossible to fully achieve," he adds.
Other industry experts have already pointed out that Australians of Asian descent with such common names as Bum or Suk might be unable to do online financial transactions that require them to confirm for example, their given names on a credit card.
Even online newspaper reports of court cases involving evidence of crimes against children, or quotations from sermons condemning child pornography, are themselves at risk of being blocked from view because of the words contained in them.
And such famous Australian brands of sports clothing as Spank or Aussiebum would send the filters into melt down.
Coroneos says the Tasmanian experiment in Internet purity is in reality a nonsense for many more reasons than these.
Among them, the rapid uptake of new technology or 3G mobile telephones that are capable of transmitting live or archived videos and photos among peer groups without going through ISPs.
And the ability of experienced Internet users to find ways around any Internet `barrier' which unfortunately includes criminal elements.
Coroneos says the Australian system that has been in place since 2000 offers multiple levels of protection that mean no child in the country need be exposed to harmful and offensive content.
These include criminal law sanctions which have prevented pornographic sites being hosted by any Australian Internet service provider, and a unique system, similar to virus alerts, that constantly updates the optional family Internet filters with lists of dangerous Web sites hosted in other countries.
The Federal Government agrees with the Internet Industry Association but had its hand forced by a party room revolt in which vocal family values oriented backbenchers led by Senator Barnett demanded the "turning off of Internet nasties at the tap," meaning the ISPs that connect people to wherever they want to go on the Web.
The Communications Minister, Helen Coonan, says the government has provided A$40 million (US$30 million) in this year's national budget to subsidize voluntary Internet filters for concerned families.
"It is much better for a family to decide what it wants to access on the Internet than for a government to tell them what they can see or read," Coonan said.
And according to Coroneos, it is also much better to slow down the Web with a filter in households that choose such an option, than slowing down everyone's access to e-commerce and all of the other routine uses of the internet with a system he believes that is doomed to fail.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this