[ProgSoc] Internet Filter

Daniel Bryan danbryan at gmail.com
Thu Jan 14 14:12:41 EST 2010


> In any case - John, the answer is easy, and has already been
> provided - SOCKS, SSH, VPN, etc are all designed to ensure that
> anyone with more than a handful of neurons to rub together can
> continue to get whatever they want.  Just set up a syndicate to
> a virtual host somewhere on the {insert preferred legally relaxed
> country code du jour's TLD here} network, and share the cost
> (trivial) and risk (also reasonably trivial).

The reality is, though, that the majority of the population *don't* have the
technical proficiency or the proactive sense to do that, and the filter will
have a collective social effect much wider than the inconvenience it causes
to the people who are able to get around it. Otherwise, noone would bother
with the filter.

It doesn't really matter whether the filter will be "relatively easy" to get
around - it succeeds (from the perspective of conservative monoculturalists)
when it prevents the majority of the population from being incidentally
exposed to the content that it prohibits - whether that be information about
safe drug use, certain political views, meme culture, pornography featuring
consenting adults (including fetishes etc.), and so on.

The emancipatory and educational power of the internet applies much more
widely than to the people who are most adept at using it, and it works best
when it's as borderless as possible. Filter policy is part of a re-assertion
of nationalism and borders and cultural prescriptivism in the one medium
that could transcend them, and which has no need for them.

It takes a long time for a new medium to become entrenched as an important
part of culture, and the filter is an attempt to shape the way it affects
our own society just as the internet is approaching the level of influence
of popular music, television, etc. There will be ways around it, and
hopefully their use will spread, but the implementation of the filter has to
be recognised as a major defeat for the advocates of a free internet. Maybe
it will wake some people up, at least.

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:37 PM, James Ducker <jducker at it.uts.edu.au> wrote:

> >> All the things the filter is designed to block technically are illegal
> >> already.
> >
> > They're not, actually. Classification is done to limit distribution,
> > not to prevent unlawful possession. In the case of the "refused
> > classification" category which will be used for the proposed filter,
> > most content is perfectly legal to possess.
>
> Sorry, that was an ambiguity on my part.
>
> - James
>
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