Censorship: Australia May Soon Lead the Way

Filed in archive News on March 22, 2009

I've seen a number of news articles recently on Australian web censorship, but this one by WIRED is more detailed than most.

It's fascinating the number and types of sites that Australia is evidently considering banning. Everything for particular YouTube videos to some porn sites to online poker. And there's no question that some of the sites are, well, bad. The issue becomes how we decide what's bad enough to be banned. Few people disagree that the Internet is filled with filth and immorality. But censorship becomes a very slippery slope. Most forms of immorality (take gossip, for example) are perfectly legal. Measuring immorality in tricky. And protecting grown adults from it is presumptuous...

The government of Australia is also ticked off at the leaking of the sites to be banned. They deny that the list being shown at Wikileaks (mentioned in the WIRED piece) is accurate. I suppose time will tell.


© ralph and jenny