Aside – An argument against internet censorship

On my personal blog, where I normally babble on about anything that strikes my interest at any given time, I recently wrote a piece about the coming internet censorship storm in Australia. If you’re not aware, it would seem that the Federal government is only weeks away from introducing into parliament a law mandating internet censorship for all in Australia. This is dangerous and repressive, and primarily uses the specious argument of “protecting the children”.

Americans may have at least had a vigorous debate about the notion of universal health care recently, but Australia is struggling to get any real debate about internet censorship going for one key reason: those leading the charge against the censorship are focusing too much on the individuals at the heart of the debate, and not the points of the debate, as discussed in this Search Networking article here. As a result, the real points of the debate are often going unheard.

As I’m a member of a minority group in Australia with rights not yet equalling those of the majority, and where those rights have been only starting to come anywhere close to parity in the last 5 or so years, I’m well aware of the danger of a government secretly censoring the topics it currently considers to be inappropriate for its population. Or to be blunt, as I write in the piece:

Had this internet censorship bill been introduced even 20 years ago, I most likely would still be largely living in fear, and laws would still vastly discriminate against me and others like me.

If you don’t live in Australia and think this bill doesn’t matter to you, you could very well be wrong. Many western democracies tend to look at what governments in different countries get away with and use those actions as precedents. If you want to read what I had to say on this topic in full, or mistakenly believe that mandatory internet censorship is probably a good idea, then please jump across to “An argument against internet censorship“.