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November 1, 2008
This time last year we were watching the ALP make halfway decent use of the internet in its election campaign, doing way better with MySpace, YouTube and other bits and pieces than the Liberals who, by comparison, were still drawing on cave walls with lumps of clay. We were promised broadband fabulousness and a laptop for every school kid. Kevin Rudd told us the internet is the way of the future while John Howard was filmed smiling admiringly at a white box with plug holes in the back that apparently had something to do with that computer thingy they all do these days. Howard warned us about porn, Rudd said our kids need the net.
You'd think that with all that tech savvy Stephen Conroy would anticipate at least a tiny bit of the mess he's got himself into with his ISP filtering scheme, now sans the opt out bit. And if he's surprised by the current levels of crossness, he'll be shocked at what follows if he goes through with it. Blocking porn is one thing, chewing up around 30% of costly bandwidth is another.
Mark Pesci foresees nasty things coming Conroy's way via the Twitter mob. As quite a few commenters on that piece point out, Twitter isn't as gigantic a network as its enthusiasts sometimes think, but that neglects the fact that Twitterers have connections everywhere, some of whom blog, some of whom start Facebook groups, some of whom write for Crikey, and one of whom they were reading at Unleashed.
Stilgherrian's another Twitterer who turns up everywhere, but tends to be slightly less restrained about things that make him cranky than the polite Mr Pesci. If you don't mind a bit of blue language with your multitudes of links, there are bits and pieces here, here, and here, an award for Conroy here, and a reproduced Crikey piece here.
Also via Stilgherrian, some big ISPs are unhappy, as you'd expect. Network engineer Mark Newton's piece at Online Opinion is a nice summary of what's wrong with the idea from a user's point of view, which takes account of a newish bit of reality of which Conroy is possibly unaware:
Not only does everyone know that the Internet isn't frightening or uncontrollable; not only do the population's own experiences clash with the Minister's hysterical allusions to unrestricted access to child pornography; but, much to the Minister's apparent astonishment, he doesn't even have the loudest voice anymore.
In the past, politicians have been able to shut-down debate by casting McCarthyist slurs which compare opponents to child pornographers: but when Mr Conroy used the same tactic in Senate Estimates on October 20, the blogosphere's incredulous ridicule seeped through into the commercial media, yielding headlines about the Minister's disgraceful debasement of the public discourse.
They may like to ignore the internet when it suits them, but the media are our friends on this. They like to pretend otherwise, but they're as reliant on access as anyone else, particularly if they want to put together one of those moral panics about depravity on the internet. Or publish pictures off some poor sod's MySpace after they've been involved in something newsworthy.
It's now being suggested that ISP level filtering could introduce new hazards for internet banking and other financial transactions.
Way to go Mr Conroy. Maybe you could get some kind of campaign going to get us all nostalgic about those lovely old passbook accounts. The kind that came with free money boxes for kids. We could use the money boxes to store the compensation you're going to owe us for commandeering the bandwidth we pay for.
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Conroy is not quite the Franca Arena of federal Labor but he's in the same general category. Lots of pursed lips and resolute determination to exploit a pissant position in government to Do Good and Make a Mark. If Family First was a viable party I get the impression Conroy would jump ship in a moment. It's easy to forget that Harradine was once a rock solid ALP member and Joe de Bruin still is.
Rudd doesn't seem to have any problem with it all, which is eloquent testimony to his view of the role of government.