By Rachel Chalmers
Australia’s federal House of Representatives has passed into law one of the world’s most draconian online censorship laws. The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act will come into effect on January 1, 2000, appropriately enough. Administered by the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), which was established to oversee censorship of films and television, the Act extends the broadcasting metaphor to the net. ISPs can be ordered to take down material rated X (sexually explicit) or RC (refused classification) within 24 hours of being notified. Critics of the law point out that users can get around it simply by logging into proxy servers.
Not only is the law likely to be ineffective, it may well damage Australia’s nascent online industry. In the past, Australian internet service providers have routinely paid for US content while giving Australian content to US carriers for free. American carriers have justified this practice by pointing to the traffic ratio. Around 70% of trans-Pacific traffic was American content requested by Australian users. As Australia’s internet industry began to grow, the ratio of Australian content being requested from the US increased and the traffic inequity began to ease, giving Australian ISPs a strong bargaining chip in their negotiations with offshore carriers. By driving homegrown content offshore, the new Act is likely to reverse that trend. US carriers will be able to impose whatever inequitable interconnect charges they like, and Australians will have little choice but to pay up.
Activist group Electronic Frontiers of Australia (EFA) responded to the passage of the legislation by calling for the resignation of the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Richard Alston. This bill is no more than a cheap political stunt, said EFA executive director Darce Cassidy. Senator Alston has shown he is unfit to hold the IT portfolio. He has ignored community concerns about free speech and privacy, dismissed advice from his own department, the CSIRO [Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation] and industry experts, and has failed to comprehend the nature of the internet… The digital age requires a Minister with a grasp of the portfolio and an eye for the future, not a man who can’t tell the difference between the internet and TV.
