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Internet Censorship and The Arts

Guest Post by Marcus Westbury January 28

Late last year the Federal Government announced that it intended to go ahead with one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a long time. The Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy – presumably assuming Australia was distracted by Christmas and Copenhagen to notice – announced that an expensive, ineffective and intrusive filter will be installed on every Internet connection in the country.

It’s philosophically dubious and practically unworkable. It will leave artists and creative enterprises particularly vulnerable to its errors, complexities and abuses. It calls into the question the very idea of Australia as a culturally liberal western democracy that values open cultural exchange, free speech and freedom of expression. As commentators from left and right, from Australia and around the world have noted that it would put Australia in a select and dubious club whose members include China, Iran and Burma. I hope and expect that it will profoundly resisted by artists and the creative community.

In case you’ve not been following it, the problems with such a scheme are many. While a filter on the underside of the Internet may sound appealing to some but the reality will be a cultural and technological nightmare. Far from being a deterrent to terrorists and paedophiles – the government report into the technology freely admits they will have no problem getting around it – it is likely to instead be a giant pain in the arse to the rest of us.

At best the filter will prevent most Australians from viewing a relatively small number of web pages contained in a secret blacklist. The leaking of an earlier and error ridden version of the list ably demonstrated that any such list will be riddled with incompetency and fodder for endless allegations of political or ideological interference by current and future governments. It’s also way short of comprehensive: Google is indexing well over a trillion pages and growing exponentially so a manually compiled list will always be falling behind.

In the government’s trial, smart filtering software didn’t work particularly effectively either. The software managed the trifecta of slowing down the Internet (sometimes drastically), letting problematic pages slip through, and blocking many legitimate pages unintentionally (and without recourse) in the process. Also the technology is only effective for web pages and not chat rooms, peer-to-peer networks or any other current and future Internet applications where undesirables things may be lurking.

The misplaced faith of parents who trust their children to the “safe” Internet provided by such a scheme will be tabloid fodder for years to come.

All this is to say nothing of those trying to get around it. A secure and encrypted internet connection to somewhere outside the country – a technology that corporate networks and IT professionals use every day – can bypass even the most repressive of filters entirely. Anyone who has spent any time in states with successful filters knows they don’t rely so much on technology as fear. Draconian laws that make it illegal to circumvent or discuss how to circumvent such systems are critical to their effectiveness.

For Australia as a cultural centre, if the response to last week’s announcement is anything to go by we risk becoming a laughing stock. If such a filter is enacted expect inconsistently applied rules, clumsily and mistakenly censored works and poor respect for freedom of expression to become a running joke in discussions of Australia around the world.

Artistic worth will likely remain a consideration in censorship. Effectively that means that Australia is about to embark on the bizarre project of empowering blacklisting bureaucrats to assess the artistic merit of hundreds of thousands of contentious web pages from around the world. If the Australia Council can be baffling imagine a small army of bureaucrats making judgements about what is and isn’t art and making it disappear from our internet connections accordingly.

Perversely the sheer absurdity of it means that “blocked in Australia” may well become a badge that many may wear with pride. Local and international artists will inevitably provocatively position their work at the fuzzy boundaries of political speech and censored expression under such a system. Expect the filter to spurn creative works ranging from the undergraduate and puerile to the nuanced and politically charged. The censorship of Australian arts and artists will be both tabloid fodder locally and a cause celebre for free speech advocates and the arts community internationally.

Lets hope it doesn’t come to that. I’d like to think that government has failed to consider the full ramifications of their approach. If the response online is anything to go by they’ve certainly underestimated the reaction to the policy. Australian artists could help by getting creative in opposing the legislation before they need to get creative to get around it.

Cross-posted from my life. on the internets

Post Script: Spike would also like to congratulate Marcus on being named Newcastle Citizen of the Year on Tuesday for his work on the Renew Newcastle project - find out more about Renew Newcastle here.

 

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