Intellectual Property Law

Australian Filtering Debate Continues

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

Colin Jacobs, vice chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia, has written an article on Crikey that assesses both Australia’s filtering plan and my analysis of it. A number of blogs have picked up the story (North Coast Voices, Blogtariat, Woolly Days, Knowfirst, Your Democracy, Tech Talk at ABC Science Forum, Peak Energy, Tech News Review among others, and Rebecca MacKinnon generously Twittered it). (Is “Twitter” now a verb? I fear for our language.) Colin’s article has also generated some very valuable feedback on the piece, and I’ll be revising it shortly in light of comments. (To date, I’ve heard primarily from commentators who are concerned about the proposed filtering program; I’d be delighted to have input from proponents as well.) There are two consistent themes in the feedback that I’d like to share and address a bit:

First, Jacobs and others feel that I may overstate the influence of minority party Senators, such as Steve Fielding, on the composition and expansion of Labor’s filtering plans. This is entirely fair. My analysis, from reading media sources, was that Minister Stephen Conroy had enlarged the scope of material to be blocked to maintain sufficient support for Labor’s plan in Australia’s Senate. Another alternative is that the expansion derives either from Minister Conroy’s policy preferences, or from the larger Labor Party’s views. If true, this would be of concern, as it might indicate that Labor campaigned on a more limited filtering vision (geared primarily to child protection) with plans to expand censorship once in office. It’s difficult to know what is driving the political and policy dynamics behind the broadened sweep of filtering, and I’ll accordingly be more cautious in the next version of the paper.

Second, there is some suggestion that I may give the Labor government too much credit for openness - that the opacity of the proposed filtering system should undercut my positive assessment of Australia on the openness prong. Here I have to disagree slightly, with an explanation. Labor has been up front about its intentions to filter, and it has offered a rationale for doing so: child protection. My criticism of the government has been that it is not sufficiently transparent about what material should be blocked to protect children, how it will arrive at those decisions, and how it will implement them technologically. I treat this under the transparency prong of my analytical framework. In short, I think I agree with the thrust of this feedback - I just put it in a different slot in my methodology.

I also think that Labor deserves credit for pushing their filtering plan via the political process, rather than through back-room pressure on ISPs to “voluntarily” block access, as happened in Great Britain and even my home state of New York. The controversy over the program is a credit to this choice and to an engaged Internet community in Australia, including particularly Jacobs and the EFA.

The filtering trials that start this month will tell us a lot, and I’m eager to see how they come out.

Full post as published by Info/Law on January 11, 2009 (boomark / email).