Australian digital rights organizations are applauding the high turnout in a country-wide demonstration against proposed Australian internet blacklists.
The Electronic Frontiers Australia recently applauded the high turnout for protests against proposed censorship laws that would block access to websites deemed by the government as “inappropriate”.
From the press release:
“The forthcoming protests by the Digital Liberty Coalition and the petition by GetUp! show the depth of community disagreement with the government on this issue”, said EFA spokesperson Danny Yee.
The proposed censorship system would target web material that would be legal in other media. “Australians are unhappy with existing censorship of computer games and films. The last thing they want is even more stringent censorship of online content.”
A mandatory blacklist of 1,300 or 10,000 web pages would do almost nothing to protect children from inappropriate content. “Australians are prepared to take responsibility for protecting their own children from inappropriate content, using their own choice of filtering software as necessary. They recognize government involvement as ineffective and paternalistic.”
The Clean Feeds official blog featured video’s of the talks given at the protests.
Colin Jacobs:
Danny Yee:
To get a better understanding of the size of the protest, one can look back at the ‘No Censorship’ blog posting to see how many cities the protests took place in.
Get Up! Action for Australia adds that the censorship system would slow the internet for Australians down by 87%. They urge citizens to sign a petition against the censorship proposals.
One of their main messages activists are trying to get out is to not believe the rhetoric because blocking websites is far larger than just “protecting the children”. Colin Jacobs commented in the video that even if you gave the current government the shadow of a doubt and trusted them to only block the websites that really should be blocked, would you trust the next government to do the same or the next? He also suggests that legitimate websites are already being put on the blacklist including the now famous case of British ISPs blocking of Wikipedia. He says that he believes that it’s the duty of the government to protect citizens from future governments.
Previously on ZeroPaid:
Australian Anti-ISP Filtering Protesters to Rally Dec 13th
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