The filter is the future

So, it's been confirmed. The long talked about, much-maligned Internet filter is coming to Australia. Proving that the worst thing about being young and understanding the Internet is that the country is controlled by people who are old and don't. Because, I assure you, beyond any other criticisms you might fling at this initiative (and there are many to be flung), the primary problem is that it simply won't achieve any of its professed aims i.e. the protection of all Australians from content marked as being Refused Classification (which, notably, is far beyond what was on that ACMA blacklist leaked back in March).

Here is a video that depicts how wayward this scheme is:



God I love that show. Anyway. On a general level, this filter is ostensibly targeted at all Australians, being - to use Senator Conroy's words - members of "civilised society". But that's a pretty large target market, Minister, so let's break it down a bit shall we?

First up, any child porn and beastiality enthusiast worth their salt would not be caught dead using the sorts of HTTP services that this filter is likely to capture. HTTP is like the Internet's equivalent of a duck sitting in a barrel. If that duck is up to something sketchy, it's awfully easy to get shot. Unless the barrel is Russian, in which case sketchiness seems to be a State-endorsed national pastime. But the point remains, if this is your bag, the filter is not going to be a major impediment to the pursuit of your hobbies.

Second, any adult with even the most basic understanding of how the Internet works will never stumble upon any of these problem sites, even by accident. I mean, you have to be properly searching for this shit to get anywhere near it. It's not going to be the third post off the blocks when you do a search for 'couch prices'. But say you did wrongly arrive at the sites in question. Rather than having a browse, nodding approvingly and adding it to your del.icio.us, the immediate reaction of most adults in this "civilised society" would probably be to close your browser as fast as possible, shut down the computer and then burn it to the ground so that noone could ever prove that you actually saw anything illegal. It might also help to remove your eyes.

Next, we have the teenagers. I've been a teenager. It wasn't even that long ago. At the time a lot of the guys were big fans of rotten.com. Which I assure you I never visited. It was, from all reports, heinous. Me? I'd spend hours trawling LimeWire looking for grainy, three second snatches of nudity and then stash them in hidden folders on the home computer where no-one would ever find them. The point being that if you're a teenager and you get a thought in your mind, you will find a way around it. Especially when it comes to sex. I can assure you, especially if their parents have gone for the optional extra levels of filtering that excludes all X-rated content, your teenager will have it cracked within hours. And because they're unlikely to share their secret with you, suddenly they'll be watching a whole lot more porn than you can.

And finally we have the oft-cited 'children'. Always a reliable fallback. And yes, they are indeed vulnerable, and should be protected from the broader horrors of the world, but seriously, how much unsupervised browsing is your nine year old doing? And even if they are, how are they moving from the Barbie homepage to sexyhorses.com (I'm almost positive that page doesn't actually exist)? Maybe such a link would have been more feasible back in the early days of the web, when it was mostly disconnected back alleyways and dark cul-de-sacs of content, but things have changed a bit over the last decade. These days gleaming, family friendly highways carry the vast majority of the Internet's information from place to place. And the popular ethic that underpins Google's search algorithms means that you actually have to burrow deep in order to get near questionable content. Hell, if you're really worried, just turn on Safe Search. Explorers of the world they may be, but if a pre-teen cares enough to work out how to turn off Google Safe Search, then that is one truly errant child and its problems have probably already well and truly commenced.

So, the filter is a $120 million project without a real reason for being that will achieve essentially nothing. It also returns false positives on 3.4% of the legitimate Internet. Let's imagine for a moment that a random 3.4% assortment of the currently available books in the world were accidentally banned. You can't imagine it? Ex-fucking-actly.

Thing is, once the Government had a stated position on the issue the various laws of politics demanded that - independent inquiry or not - the decision to implement the plan was next best thing to a fait accompli. For all the errors and embarrassments, they were never going to double back on their platform. You always hoped otherwise, but today's announcement was as inevitable as the shitness of this year's Astro Boy remake.

There's no guarantee the filter will get through, but it might. Under Turnbull I imagine the opposition from the Liberals would have been swift and strenuous. But with Abbott... I dunno. This beast may well pass. And if it does, it won't be the end of the world, and most of us won't even notice the fact it's there. Most of the time. But it will be and it will be open to abuse and it will be isolating us a bit more from the rest of the world (3.4%?!) and it will be a catastrophic waste of money with no real purpose beyond a cynical political appeal to the social conservatives, a class of voters the Labor party doesn't even actively court.

And so, once again, Australian democracy seems to boil down to having to vote for the party you have the least amount of issues with. Hoorah! The Greeks would be proud.