The Net may not belong to libertarians. But it doesn’t belong to scaremongering totalitarians like Clive Hamilton either. The key phrase in Mr. Hamilton’s ludicrous slippery slope argument is this:
“He types in a search for, say, ’sex pictures’.”
In other words, the hypothetical boy got exactly what he asked for. As Trent points, out, Mr. Hamilton’s example shows a complete disregard for the responsibilities of parents and individual moral responsibility. The web is an encyclopaedic resource – do we supervise children whilst they flick through the pages, or just tear out the bits we don’t agree with in case they get hold of it when we aren’t looking?

I find it revealing that despite the unquestionable moral evil of the examples cited by Mr. Hamilton, very few (with the exception of bestiality) are illegal under Australian law. Despite his protestations, what he is in effect asking for is a double standard, with the Internet being more tightly restricted than other equivalent media.

Software already exists to allow parents to regulate what their children can access on the Internet, and comes pre-loaded on many modern operating systems. These systems aren’t infallible, but neither are our society’s precautions to prevent pornographic magazines or films falling into the hands of minors. What Mr. Hamilton is effectively asking is that we ban all media not rated G.

Whether he understands this is another matter – he certainly doesn’t seem to understand how the Internet works, as evinced by this inane comment:
“…we have laws banning Australian ISPs from hosting the kinds of pornographic imagery I have described above, which all come from overseas sites…”
Internet Service Providers, of course, do not ‘host’ anything. The imagery in question, is hosted on the aforementioned “overseas” sites. ISPs are utility providers. They exist to deliver access to the Internet, which is an international network. The filtering system Mr. Hamilton is describing is a secret list of sites which are surruptitiously INTERCEPTED and made unavailable when requested by the Australian user. A “page not found” error message will be displayed, giving the impression the content does not exist. This is supposedly to prevent owners of illegal sites realising they are being blocked and simply switching to another host. However, because the list of blocked sites is kept secret (for the same reason) there is absolutely no accountability and nothing at all to prevent these crypto-government organisations censoring anything they want.

Mr. Hamilton would no doubt accuse me of ’scare-mongering’ for this, but the fact is it’s already begun. In the UK the Internet Watch Foundation caused uproar recently when it banned, not just an image, but an entire article on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, in the process accidentally blocking the entire country from editing the site. When Wikipedia produced an article on the controversy (without the offending image) they blocked that, too. The fact that the IWF felt enabled not just to censor the Internet, but censor all reference to their censorship, should give pause to anyone seeking to promote such a scheme in Australia.

To restate: Ample software solutions exist to enable individual families to restrict what their children can do online. Anything else is ultimately destructive to free speech and the liberty of the Australian citizen.

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But I guess we know what Australian IT thinks about free speech.