14 DAY TRIAL // Net neutrality may be a topic of hot debate in some parts of the world, most notably in the US, but in other regions the Internet is facing worse threats than throttling YouTube videos, downright censorship is being advocated and we're not talking about China or other countries notorious for their abuses, the culprit is Australia, a country that bills itself as a democracy. There are plans to institute a mandatory, country-wide filtering system, supposedly designed to keep out child abuse content, but which blocks a much wider variety of content and topics. Naturally, the plan doesn't exactly have that many fans among political parties, rights organizations or companies and Google is speaking out publicly against the plan.
“We have a bias in favour of people's right to free expression. While we recognise that protecting the free exchange of ideas and information cannot be without some limits, we believe that more information generally means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual,” Iarla Flynn, head of Policy, Google Australia wrote.
The biggest issue with the system in its proposed form is that it censors a wide category of content classified in the country as Refused Classification (RC). These include child abuse and other controversial adult content, but also instructions or instigation for committing crimes or acts of violence including drug use.
“But moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information,” Google added. "This type of content may be unpleasant and unpalatable but we believe that government should not have the right to block information which can inform debate of controversial issues."
It was shown that, in practice, the system has many flaws and that a significant amount of legitimate material was being blocked. Moving from the technical aspects, some politically controversial issues are also covered, topics like euthanasia. Google's view is that political and social norms change over time and the only way to ensure that they do so is by encouraging a healthy and informed debate rather than completely ignoring one side of the issue.
Google advocates a different approach showing that companies and, indeed, parents can be trusted with providing the adequate tools and means for protecting children from questionable material, Google's own SafeSearch Lock is a great example of that, and that these things should be left to the discretion of the parents rather than being handed down from above.