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Australian Net Censor Law Passes by Stewart Taggart 8:15 a.m. 30.Jun.99.PDT CANBERRA, Australia -- The political leaders of this nation on Wednesday passed into law one of the world's most far-reaching online content censorship regimes. The rules -- which take effect 1 January, 2000 -- enable Australian government regulators to order domestic Internet service providers (ISPs) to take down indecent or offensive Web sites housed on their servers, and also require they block access to certain domestic or overseas-based content.
See also: Australia's Brave New World
"We're on fairly new ground here," said Stephen Nugent, special projects manager for the Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA). "The codes of practice envisaged under this legislation are probably more detailed, and cover a greater range of matters, than I have seen in any other country." Known as the "Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act", the measure was approved by the House of Representatives late Wednesday night, according to a staffer in the office of Communications Minister Richard Alston. The measure had passed the more contentious Australian Senate on 26 May. The new law will institute a movie-like rating system for Internet content. The ABA will order ISPs to take down content on their servers rated X (Sexually Explicit) or RC (Refused Classification) within 24 hours of being notified. For opponents of online content restrictions, the struggle will now shift to cyberspace itself. They believe the Internet simply will prove too large, too decentralized, and too fast-moving for regulators anywhere to successfully block access to any content for long. Among the defiant is Perth-based online entrepreneur Bernadette Taylor. Known to her Web site admirers as a "Virtual Girlfriend," she offers nude photos of herself and personalized email communication to paying members. To Taylor, passage of the law merely begins a hide-and-seek game she professes little doubt she'll win. With a Web site housed in Dallas, Texas, she plans to stay one step ahead of the nation's blocking mechanisms for as long as the law lasts. "With a bit of effort the ABA could find (and block) me every day but they'd have to spend five to 10 minutes doing it," she says. "In the meantime, I'm compiling a mail list which has all the people that want notification of where I am." She believes her Australian-based users will encounter little ongoing difficulty accessing her site, either through using encryption software or through proxy servers that disguise the source of material. One such proxy server has been set up by South Australian Web site builder and e-commerce businessman Mike Russell. By visiting www.whois.com.au, Australian Web users will be able to access any site they want without disclosing where they're visiting. Since banning proxy servers isn't included in the legislation, Russell says there will be little Australian regulators can do. Among other defiant gestures, Russell is calling for a worldwide boycott by Web sites of visitors from "gov.au" domains -- recommending all such visitors be redirected by webmasters to the home page of Electronic Frontiers Australia, the online civil liberties group that spearheaded a failed effort to stop the law. In introducing the online content legislation, the center-right government of Prime Minister John Howard argued that some controls are needed to limit access by children to pornographic content on the Internet, as well as other material that could be deemed offensive. Passage of the law comes amid research showing Internet use is rising rapidly in Australia. Figures released Wednesday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed nearly 18 percent of Australia's households now have some form of Internet access -- a rise of nearly 50 percent in one year. Nearly 40 percent of Internet households in Australia now access the Internet on a daily basis, the researchers found. To Grant Bayley, a Sydney spokesman for 2600 Australia, an organization of technology enthusiasts, the fact that the law comes into force on 1 January, 2000 provides at least one indication that Australian lawmakers may not have been fully cognizant on all the issues involved. "January 1 is not going to be one of the best days in the world to implement this," he said, referring to the long-feared Year 2000 problem in which worldwide computers may start acting up due to the millennial date change. "There are going to be much bigger problems around," he said.
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