(Above: shocking. Ban it).
Chairman Rupert cheerleader Mark Day shows he has a lot in common with the current Chinese government in Like it or lump it, net won't be free of regulation.
He provides a sterling example of how the commentariat has jumped from the matter of child porn to the more general tune of a well-regulated internet, along with enthusiastic support for Stephen Conroy's attempts to prove he can out-mandarin the mandarins of China.
"Why is the internet special?" he (Conroy) asked. "It's just a communication and distribution platform. This argument that the internet is some mystical creation that no laws should apply to -- that is a recipe for anarchy and the wild west.
"I believe in a civil society and in a civil society people behave the same way in the physical world as they behave in the virtual world."
Indeed. And if you believe in a censorious society, then in a censorious society, people behave in the virtual world in the same way as they do in the physical world. Ban it! That'll solve everything. Ban it, ban it good, ban it hard!
And in the physical world, the banning brigade are ever active, as wowserdom and Mother Grundies seek the right to interfere with the rights of others.
The latest notion to spring forth, Prohibition style, is that magazines like Playboy and Penthouse should be banned from newsagents, milkbars, convenience stores, supermarkets and petrol stations, in yet another attempt to return the world to the nineteen fifties.
Child experts want ban on soft porn magazines, shrieks the header in the Sydney Morning Herald, handily illustrated by a cover snap from Playboy showing a model clutching a tit.
The group has asked censorship ministers to review the rules on which the so-called lads' mags such as People, The Picture, Zoo and Ralph are reviewed, saying they are increasingly explicit and contributing to the sexualisation of children.
More than thirty child experts! Case closed. Experts like Noni Hazlehurst, who happens to be an actor with a bee in her bonnet. Tim Costello. Alastair Nicholson. Kids Free 2B Kids. The usual suspects.
Well I can say with some pleasure that I don't read Playboy or the Penthouse for the articles or the pictures. If I want images of pneumatic things, I usually take a look at tyres. On cars or bicycles. Whatever, provided there's a pump handy you can always get them nicely inflated.
As for the likes of People, I have seen it in my rural travels, but I find myself more disturbed by the fetishising of cars you're likely to see in such rags, once again proving my theory that the size of an exhaust pipe is intricately related to the size of a man's penis.
Thankfully the straw poll conducted by the Herald in association with the beat up - spoiler alert - which is as meaningless as the moral panic the fear merchants are constantly trying to whip up - has the anti-banners in a safe majority.
If the banners carried on about militarism and soldiers and support for military action and war mongering in the same way and with equal fervour, we might get a little more peace and quiet on the planet, downtime in which everybody could begin to explore a healthy relationship with their sexuality. I
I've always wondered why fucking someone was so problematic, or the sight of a nude body so disturbing, as opposed to killing people in the name of some glorious ideological notion of truth and justice, and hiding away the photos of what modern weapons can do to flesh and blood.
You have the right to vote in this rigged ballot - here, put your dead hand on the pad so we can fingerprint it and certify you could have voted for a corrupt loon like Hamid Karzai, had you been alive instead of being taken out by friendly fire at a wedding party.
So it's interesting that Day puts himself in the 'won't someone think of the children', 'won't someone save the children' camp.
One of the issues he (Lawrence Strickling) highlighted was the protection of children, which is front and central to Conroy's proposals to filter the Australian internet. As I have mentioned before, I have some sympathies for this proposal because I find it hard to agree that keeping the net free and unfettered in every way, shape or form is more important than seeking to restrict children's access to the worst excesses of rape, incest and bestiality. These nasties are covered in the non-net world by censorship classification laws. If content is judged to be so bad that it is refused any classification, it becomes illegal to sell that content in print, DVD or movie versions.
Conroy asks: "Why should the internet be treated differently?"
Well actually they happen to be illegal on the internet too, and the filter won't stop them from happening, or those interested in accessing them finding what they're after.
But if I happened to be the parent of a child looking at magazines on a magazine rack, and if they happened to be of a mildly salacious kind - and let's face it, civilisation hasn't fallen since Hugh Hefner introduced a new kind of vulgarity to the world - I'd point them in the direction of comics where they could enjoy mindless mayhem or The Simpsons.
And if they happened to be surfing on the intertubes, I'd be wondering why - if I was a parent who cared about such things - I hadn't already implemented a filtering system, without the benefit of Conroy's stupefying, futile and ineffective paternalism.
But as usual, the only time the nanny state conservatives get excited is when the state government threatens to infringe on their right to speed. In cars.
But it gets even more fanciful when Day keeps up his embrace of Lawrence Strickling, and seems to get excited about his call for an internet policy 3.0 (like you know that's so beta plus):
Strickling describes the net as an agglomeration of human actors; a large and growing social organisation with no natural laws to guide it and no self-regulating equilibrium point.
No natural laws to guide it! Mere anarchy and chaos. And here I was thinking that the laws of defamation applied to anything you published on the web, and that some had found this out to their cost. And that other laws did too. Maybe those hapless college and working class pirates who got busted for flogging music around the P2P traps were in some alternative universe.
But the grand vision gets even more visionary:
He (Strickling) says there must be rules because "this cacophony of human actors" demands that there be rules or laws created to protect their interests. Users want to know that online transactions are safe; content owners want copyright protection; large enterprises want protection from hacking -- and these policy tensions need to be addressed.
Ah yes, "policy tensions". Often called the matter of cash in the paw for big corporations so the sheep don't get ideas beyond their station. And what better way to defeat the pirates than to deploy Senator Conroy's great big internet filter.
Strickling says his agency is this year addressing regulatory questions around the issues of privacy, child protection, cyber security, copyright and internet governance. Already the blogging world is fearing the worst: that Strickling's agenda represents the thin edge of the wedge and the real aim is to censor the web.
This is typical of the tendency of many bloggers to see conspiracies everywhere, but the fact that these issues are on the table in the nation that gave us a hands-off approach through the policy of net neutrality, suggests some significant changes may be in store.
Huh? In the usual way of Mark Day, it's the poor old bloggers who cop the blast. Day tends to see bloggers as a vast enemy of unherd-able anarchistic cats, undermining the right of Chairman Rupert to charge and fleece the sheep in the virtual world in the way he's done for years in the real world.
Bloggers, you see, are always paranoid conspiracists, inclined to rant and rail.
Except of course in Day's very own column, there's a mind set on display and more than ample ancillary material designed to get conspiracy theorists anxious about the way old media and big media and Chairman Rupert and conservative politicians of a Catholic kind like Conroy will argue, scheme and plot relentlessly ... to bring the full to overflowing intertubes to heel.
No doubt in the interests of keeping the intertubes safe for Mickey Mouse and the house of mouse, we can expect to see copyright increased to one hundred years for corporations, and a determined effort to regulate piracy into oblivion. Along with unseemly, troublesome, unruly and difficult ideas about life, politics and the universe.
Well good luck with that. It's working a treat in China.
And yet in China, there are millions of spies at work ready to dob in sites containing pornography. And there are plenty willing and able to black ban any errant thinkers about politics and the Communist party and its associated causes.
If that's the new orderly internet 3.0 being dreamed up by the bureaucrats in the ostensibly free world, include me out. It's back to usenet and 4chan, even if I have no interest in them.
Couldn't happen you say? Well how did the house of mouse score its 75 year copyright ruling and safety up for the mouse to 2023, beyond the use of trademarks which guarantees perpetual ownership, provided the character is continued to be exploited commercially? (here)
In short, there's all kinds of things that can be conflated under the name of regulation of the intertubes and keeping the children safe - not limited to, but also including Australian content, and the anti-siphoning laws currently in play in Australia in relation to free to air television - and all kinds of interest groups anxious to get a piece of the action, be it keeping Playboy in a ghetto or preventing teenagers from accessing Penthouse. Or whatever else they find offensive and problematic, and the killjoys are out there in abundance, waiting to censor, ban, black line and otherwise force the world to conform to their own set of prejudices.
And when someone like Day blithely jumps from pornography to net neutrality , and the joys of introducing significant changes to that concept, then it's probably fair to say that paranoid bloggers are simply people who know a little of what's going on. As good old junkie Bill once said, sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.
Never mind, the genie is out of the bottle, and no matter how they try to herd the cats, those few interested in climbing the wall of Conroy's filtered mind will somehow manage.
But ain't it strange that, for all the blather about democracy and freedom, there are many who fear the way people can now speak their minds, and the way adults can read, see, and think what they like ...
"The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you are paranoid enough."
- Max, Strange Days(Below: something more for the gentleman reader. Kids, talk to your parents about an internet filter for your computer if somehow you're reading this. Remember nudity is evil.
Funnily enough, it was the wowsers who gave Bob Guccione his start, by whacking him with a 110 quid fine in 1965 for using Her Majesty's mail to distribute pornography. The 120,000 copies he had printed sold within the week, helping him built the springboard for the US start up in 1969. Now when the format is old and dying and so last century dead tree, the wowsers are at it again. Nude women? Shocking. Women in the army killing people? Tremendously advanced feminism. Go figure).
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