Commentary

Who censures the censor?

Simon Hackett

Published 3:45 PM, 27 Oct 2008

Recently, a senior member of staff at Internode, Mark Newton, has been the subject of a rather fascinating set of media articles regarding his personal opinions on the government's internet censorship policy.
This all started when a journalist decided to “lift” Newton's personal comments in a Whirlpool forum thread, without permission, and use them as if they were the formal position of his employer.

This, by the way, is lazy journalism – there are no (good) excuses for not bothering to ask him before reprinting his words, and for leveraging the name of his employer when those views were clearly his own personal views.

Newton isn’t a one hit wonder when it comes to strong, cogent, clearly argued opinion on the flaws in government schemes to control what Australians can access via the internet. He has been writing to politicians about these issues directly for years. What he writes are detailed, thoughtful and well researched letters demanding an equally thoughtful response.
A senior federal staffer reminded me just the other day that in Canberra, the public service believes that ABC TV's "The Hollowmen" is a documentary. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite so surprised about what happened next.

As reported recently, an email and a phone call ensued from Canberra to the Internet Industry Association (IIA), requesting the organisation to ask one of its members (Internode) to get their senior management (i.e. me) to ask Newton to desist in voicing his opinions publicly.

For the record: I have no problems with Mark Newton (or anyone else at Internode) speaking their mind about internet-related issues in this country. All they need to do (and Mark did so) is to be clear that they are writing as a concerned member of the voting public, and not representing Internode corporate policy.

Lets move on now, from that specific incident to the more general issue – that of whether there is real community demand for internet filtering, and of how the government should best enable its constituents to protect their children when using the internet.

If there was huge underlying demand for internet content filtering in Australia, presumably there would already have been a large take-up of the widely promoted NetAlert scheme.

NetAlert offers all Australian families access to client-side filtering software at no cost to them. The government pays the software license fees for each family that decides to license the software. The scheme remains active to this day.

It would be instructive in this regard for the government to publish the statistics on the total number of families who have chosen to license and use (not just to download) the NetAlert filtering software since the inception of the scheme.

The position of Internode in terms of content filtering, by the way, is that the challenges around illegal content dissemination on the internet in Australia are best handled by the government working with the IIA to further develop their existing and applicable “Enforceable Codes of Conduct”.

Ultimately, community discussion of the details of such an important policy is constructive, and should be encouraged. If that discussion leads to improvements in the policy and its implementation, surely this can only be a good thing.


|  

Sponsored Links