Child pornography existed long before the Internet did. Spam is no worse than the legal and sanctioned bulk mail that the US Postal Service delivers to my house every day. And spam and child porn are so far apart on the ‘Bad Shit’ scale that it’s not even funny. Filtering child porn does not mean it stops happening – it means you stop seeing it. Thus far, the head-in-the-sand approach to crime-fighting and prevention is a failure.

Attempts by governments to stem the tide of illegal activities on the internet have become a much more commonplace occurrence in recent years. Illegal content of all kinds has been used as a warrant to impose sanctions on internet providers, and use their records to track “offenders” world wide. Starting with the US Supreme Court decisions to fine persons found to be “making available” copyrighted media and software, world governments have begun a witch hunt for “software terrorists”. The action taken by Australian officials to require ISPs to block traffic from “black listed” sites is only the first step that recording industry advocates will likely use to impose a global ban on peer-to- peer networks. As occurrences like this one become the norm, internet users will find themselves appealing to the electronic “higher powers” to allow their content to be posted on the web. Recently in China, one of the more prominent world governments to embrace net censorship, a blogger was imprisoned for expressing ideas that violated the ruling party’s ideals. This proposition of regulation raises the same question as any other conduct guideline, who will enforce the standard? To borrow terms from the standard model, who will “police” the new internet frontier? Certainly this kind of regulation could be used to protect children from predators and questionable material; however this protection comes at the cost of potentially limiting their access to useful information as well. What criteria will be used to determine if a site is “unfit” for youth viewing? By what standards are the individuals to be held who are placed in the position of reviewing it? And what of the hundreds, if not thousands, of new sites introduced to the internet each day, will these sites be automatically blacklisted until they are reviewed and declared acceptable? I am reminded of the movie Equilibrium where the decision of a fictional government declared that “questionable” materials where declared of no value and subsequently destroyed. Actions like this one have been shown by historic world powers, bent on media domination and propaganda driven control, to be the first motions in a trend toward more radical change. It is the responsibility of internet users to ensure people are aware of the dangerous ramification of this kind of legislation. We must be vigilant in fighting to insure access, for everyone, to our most incredible sources of civic power, information.

The Australian Constitution does not have any express provision relating to freedom of speech. In theory, therefore, the Commonwealth Parliament may restrict or censor speech through censorship legislation or other laws, as long as they are otherwise within constitutional power.

http://www.aph.gov.au/library/Pubs/RN/2001-02/02rn42.htm