The Censorship of Online Content in Australia
In this week's post Sydney PEN Young Writers Committee member Nick Landreth explores the online censorship debate.
At an awards night speech on 21 March, the Federal Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan, reconfirmed her government's commitment to 'protecting Australian families on-line', outlining its role as "ensuring measures are in place that restrict access to offensive online content and protect children from exposure to content that is unsuitable for them." She outlined a new scheme for filtering offensive content, motivated primarily to delimit the reach of those publishing material endorsing violence and sexual abuse.
This address is reflective of much public discussion regarding internet regulation in Australia over the last decade or so. Whilst an authority overseeing illegal material in such an anarchic domain is of some necessity, it also raises concerns over the government’s powers over other internet content.
Amongst a mix of Commonwealth, State and Territory criminal laws pertaining to this content stands Schedule 5 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 which was inserted by the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999. Schedule 5, while dealing with more specific infringements, enables the Federal government regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, to issue 'take-down' notices to internet service providers carrying what is considered , 'likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult'.
In a political climate where publishers’ incitement of insecurity and moral impropriety is considered an offence, one begins to worry how long it will be before the phrase 'likely to cause offence' is stretched to cover anything likely to stir political discord.
This ability to command the removal of online content has already become an issue to some Australian writers. The reality of the situation is that under current laws, a determination to order the deletion of material does not require any parliamentary approval or a publicised legal excuse. In March last year, internet service provider Melbourne IT removed Richard Neville's satirical website johnhowardpm.org from its servers. For 3 days Neville was given no explanation why this had occurred. Eventually it appeared that a mock transcript apologising for Australia's continued involvement in Iraq he had posted 36 hours prior to the site's removal had been so offensive that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet had complained that the use of the domain name johnhowardpm.org infringed John Howard's intellectual property rights. Neville expressed confusion over why established legal recourse for pursuing intellectual property infringement complaints was not followed, and discovered that Melbourne IT had received calls from three Australian Federal Police following the posting. Melbourne IT would not disclose the subject of these calls.
A year down the track, an early draft of a new Content Services Bill from Coonan's department was released mid-March pushing to make content broadcast over mobile telephones and the internet liable to the same government scrutiny as video game and film classification. Alarm raised by the Australian Publishers Association over government censorship of the written content they provide across the web has led to a redrafting of this bill, but still Australian governmental bodies’ ability to arbitrarily proscribe publications on the internet remains unaddressed.
Convention has kept serious interference with Australian internet publishing relatively minimal, but the anti-censorship lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia has noted that the power of our legislative authorities over internet service providers and the material they carry is amongst the most extensive in the world. The Iranian administration, one of Reporters Without Borders' top fifteen 'Enemies of the Internet', has chosen to exercise the control it has over internet content and ordered the registration of all Iranian websites. Websites that do not meet the criteria for registration or choose not to register can not be accessed within Iran, nor can unregistered Iranian information channels be accessed from abroad. At the same time Iranian authorities, like ours, are increasingly using the internet to spread sanctioned information about Iran in order to influence opinion and communicate their ideals.
Here we have a situation where information is passed if its authors are granted conditional permission, a severe instance of censorship denying expression that does not conform to state-endorsed guidelines. Whilst Iran's is an extreme case, it is perturbing for Australians publishing on the web that the only failsafe against our government engaging similar powers seems to be our trust in them not to.
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At an awards night speech on 21 March, the Federal Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan, reconfirmed her government's commitment to 'protecting Australian families on-line', outlining its role as "ensuring measures are in place that restrict access to offensive online content and protect children from exposure to content that is unsuitable for them." She outlined a new scheme for filtering offensive content, motivated primarily to delimit the reach of those publishing material endorsing violence and sexual abuse.
This address is reflective of much public discussion regarding internet regulation in Australia over the last decade or so. Whilst an authority overseeing illegal material in such an anarchic domain is of some necessity, it also raises concerns over the government’s powers over other internet content.
Amongst a mix of Commonwealth, State and Territory criminal laws pertaining to this content stands Schedule 5 of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 which was inserted by the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999. Schedule 5, while dealing with more specific infringements, enables the Federal government regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, to issue 'take-down' notices to internet service providers carrying what is considered , 'likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult'.
In a political climate where publishers’ incitement of insecurity and moral impropriety is considered an offence, one begins to worry how long it will be before the phrase 'likely to cause offence' is stretched to cover anything likely to stir political discord.
This ability to command the removal of online content has already become an issue to some Australian writers. The reality of the situation is that under current laws, a determination to order the deletion of material does not require any parliamentary approval or a publicised legal excuse. In March last year, internet service provider Melbourne IT removed Richard Neville's satirical website johnhowardpm.org from its servers. For 3 days Neville was given no explanation why this had occurred. Eventually it appeared that a mock transcript apologising for Australia's continued involvement in Iraq he had posted 36 hours prior to the site's removal had been so offensive that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet had complained that the use of the domain name johnhowardpm.org infringed John Howard's intellectual property rights. Neville expressed confusion over why established legal recourse for pursuing intellectual property infringement complaints was not followed, and discovered that Melbourne IT had received calls from three Australian Federal Police following the posting. Melbourne IT would not disclose the subject of these calls.
A year down the track, an early draft of a new Content Services Bill from Coonan's department was released mid-March pushing to make content broadcast over mobile telephones and the internet liable to the same government scrutiny as video game and film classification. Alarm raised by the Australian Publishers Association over government censorship of the written content they provide across the web has led to a redrafting of this bill, but still Australian governmental bodies’ ability to arbitrarily proscribe publications on the internet remains unaddressed.
Convention has kept serious interference with Australian internet publishing relatively minimal, but the anti-censorship lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia has noted that the power of our legislative authorities over internet service providers and the material they carry is amongst the most extensive in the world. The Iranian administration, one of Reporters Without Borders' top fifteen 'Enemies of the Internet', has chosen to exercise the control it has over internet content and ordered the registration of all Iranian websites. Websites that do not meet the criteria for registration or choose not to register can not be accessed within Iran, nor can unregistered Iranian information channels be accessed from abroad. At the same time Iranian authorities, like ours, are increasingly using the internet to spread sanctioned information about Iran in order to influence opinion and communicate their ideals.
Here we have a situation where information is passed if its authors are granted conditional permission, a severe instance of censorship denying expression that does not conform to state-endorsed guidelines. Whilst Iran's is an extreme case, it is perturbing for Australians publishing on the web that the only failsafe against our government engaging similar powers seems to be our trust in them not to.
posted by Sydney PEN at 7:55 pm
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