<i>Communications Minister Stephen Conroy referred to Google's censorship on behalf of the Chinese and Thai governments in making his case for the company to impose censorship locally.</i><p>When your communication minister is making reference to Chinese internet policy in a favorable context you know something's gone badly wrong somewhere.
You know what would be awesome?
If Google just shut down youtube for australia. Even for a day. (With a site explaining that the government wants to censor it).<p>I know it will never happen - but would be so awesome if it did.
What's going on down there? There's been a burst of these sorts of stories lately.<p>I mean this seriously, since I live about 10,000 miles away; what's the story behind this burst of censorship lately? (A link is fine, but I don't have a clue what to even look for to get an answer.)
so the australian communications Minister Stephen Conroy has just set the democracy and freedom of speech and internet to chinese standards? this is sad. could someone just tell these peoples to wake up!
The really stupid thing about this is that most of the kinds of material that Conroy makes a big deal about (child porn, fetish porn, etc) is already banned on Youtube. The kinds of things that they're asking Google to go the effort of filtering are videos about things like how to do graffiti, and information about euthanasia. Not really worth it, is it?
It would be brilliant if President Obama could bring this up as a discussion topic when he visits here, next month.<p>I've noticed some intelligent and balanced commentary from the US State dept recently regarding Internet censorship, democracy and human rights.
Population of China: 1,325,639,982<p>GDP of China: $4.33 Trillion<p>Population of Australia: 21,374,000<p>GDP of Australia: $1.02 Trillion<p>As unfair as China's censorship is, they can have it because they have a large enough market. Is Australia <i>really</i> large enough for Google to be that concerned about?<p>It's not fair. But then again, business isn't fair either.
What kinds of videos do the Australians want Youtube to filter? I think this might be someone to score political points out of a minister misstatement. I suspect Youtube already does a good enough job filtering porn to satisfy the Australian government. It's not like the Australians want to start blocking words like "freedom" and "nirvana".
Our current affairs programs such as 'Today Tonight' and 'A Current Affair' feed on stories like these, which only provide more fuel for newspapers, radio talk shows and even schools for discussion.<p>The general public here is still of the naive opinion that the internet is dangerous.
So lately I've been thinking, there seems to be a large push globally towards greater censorship on the web. At the moment it would seem as if the US has been immune, but it makes me consider the possibility that in the future it could come to us too. I had this idea of building a backup system for easily and covertly passing information around on the web using the existing infrastructure in order to bypass existing filtration systems. It seems really important that we should be prepared, just in case.