Wake up Australia.  Internet censorship comparisons between China and Australia are no longer just interesting comparisons. Your communication minister is actually involking China’s policies to help try and get what he wants.

Read this Sydney Morning Herald article.

“Google at the moment filters an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Chinese government; they filter an enormous amount of material on behalf of the Thai government.”

Google Australia’s head of policy, Iarla Flynn, said the company had a bias in favour of freedom of expression in everything it did and Conroy’s comparisons between how Australia and China deal with access to information were not “helpful or relevant”.

Google continues:

“The scope of RC is simply too broad and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information. RC includes the grey realms of material instructing in any crime from [painting] graffiti to politically controversial crimes such as euthanasia, and exposing these topics to public debate is vital for democracy.”

CORE weighs in on the fact that the filter doesn’t actually do what it’s meant to do anyway:

This week the Computer Research and Education Association (CORE) put out a statement on behalf of all Australasian computer science lecturers and professors opposing the government’s internet filtering policy.

They said the filters would only block a fraction of the unwanted material available on the internet, be inapplicable to many of the current methods of online content distribution and create a false sense of security for parents.

CORE said the blacklist could be used by current and future governments to restrict freedom of speech, while those determined to get around the filters and access nasty content could do so with ease.

I just donated some money to GetUp to help spread the word on this issue.  You can too.

Living behind the Great Firewall, and with Australia planning a Ruddywall of it’s own, I have begun to wonder, are there websites that are simply too big to ban?

Take Facebook for example. First China bans YouTube – annoying, but you can get video content from many places. Twitter is still young, with fewer users here – but Facebook is a giant.

The thing is, you’ve always been able to punch through the Great Firewall using the software originally designed to secure corporate private networks (VPNs). But the average apolitical Joe previously had no need for one (myself included). But like how the anti-Napster ruling helped educate people that you can download music for free, the Facebook ban may educate people that you can visit banned sites. By banning something people have been using on a daily basis (dare I say, addicted too), you educate these users that the firewall exists, and encourage these users to seek ways to get around the ban, which then makes them educated on how to do this. Once you setup your VPN for example, now nothing is banned. All for the sake of Facebook…

So I think it is probably a mistake to ban high-profile sites with millions of users.

Get some of that minty censordyne into your ethernet cables Today!