Police gaze - photo by dyslow

The internet is the wet dream of the schoolyard show-offs. You know, the kids who just wanted to make a noise, disrupt the classroom, screw around. And now, here they are with a fabulous toy and a global audience. Anybody, anywhere, can make a racket, say whatever they want, do it anonymously and be forever unpunished. They don’t even have to finish school first.

They can be as horrid and disgusting as you like and there’s no comeback.

Well, not much.

Sure, some websites or hosts will shut down troublemakers, but there’s always another domain with more liberal policies.

If someone puts up kiddy porn or scams a lot of people, then the authorities will come after them, but by and large, there are too few trained internet police to go hunting down every last spammer. And, if the villains cover their tracks well enough, they are too difficult for the overloaded computer cops.

If the internet wasn’t so big here and we didn’t have freedom of expression built right into the Constitution, then the web might not be quite so free. Imagine if China or Soviet Russia had developed the web. It would be highly-structured, rigidly-controlled, and trouble-makers would be mercilessly harvested.

I like the way the web is. Anarchic, user-controlled; outlaw bikers and church fellowships side by IP side. Yep, there’s some dodgy neighbourhoods, but the way it’s developed is astonishing. Things like Wikipedia – the world’s most comprehensive encyclopaedia written, organised, illustrated and published in three years – for free. Or Google Maps and similar sites, showing every location on the planet from Gods-eye view. I’m old enough to find these and other amazing things the stuff of science fiction.

If government committees had approved and developed the net, we’d still be waiting for basic email, let alone porn sites, sex blogs, and gay newsgroups.

Lacking centralised control, governments lean towards censorship as a control over material they find objectionable – such as criticism, opposition parties, and radar detectors.

Places like China make no bones about censorship and control. They do their level best to shut down sites critical of the government, and if they can’t physically reach them – yes, there is still some enterprise existing outside China these days – then they block them out, erecting a new Great Wall around their heartland in these days of satellite feeds and public key cryptography.

In the Western world, overcautious agencies set their sites on terrorism and pornography, safeguarding the children and baffling the adults. It starts out easy enough, filtering out the more objectionable words. Scunthorpe in England becomes the only town where you may not book a hotel room online, but soon poultry breeders are inconvenienced, people named Richard must be named in full, club websites find new ways to refer to their registered participants, and sports reports make elliptical reference to “round objects” and “points tallies”. Well meaning pencilnecks beaver away at turning the internet into pap and drivel. Sometimes I think they’ve won the match.

It’s a common thread running through the entire existence of the Internet, or at least since religious fundamentalists became aware of it, and government after government has attempted legislation to take all the fun out of the thing. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are kept busy battling to keep the weblanes open.

Similar government efforts, more easily justified, are directed at stamping out, if not controlling, crime and terrorism. Piracy – the online variety – is depicted as an arrow aimed straight at the heart of commerce, Disney and Fox.

And, speaking of entertainment giants, if one of their products bombs, tanks or explodes onto our screens, the National Security Agency and other groups take a sudden interest in webpages using those terms. The interest of battling terrorism, of course.

On the other side of the Pacific, Australia is the latest nation – we cannot say “country” any more – to push repressive laws. Sometime in 2010 all their Internet Service Providers will be required to block material on a government-supplied blacklist. This includes agreed evils such as child pornography, but also a broader range of content: fetishy sex, instruction in crime (such as euthanasia), any computer game not suitable for under 18s. The list will be partly generated by public complaints, and may include lists imported from overseas police departments. We can only imagine Utah’s contribution.

Worse, the list will be mandatory and secret. Australians won’t know precisely what they are being protected from, only that their online content will become steadily more bland. The list will be specifically exempt from Freedom of Information requests, for example.

Heaven help the world if Australia’s Christian fundamentalist Prime Minister succeeds. He’ll be the pin-up guy for bigots everywhere. Don’t like sites offering health advice to gay folk? Abortion information to teenagers? Just slip the URL to your representative and they are out of business. Nobody will know.

Why am I concerned about censorship in China and Australia? Grl and I are running a blog that talks about sex. Sex as pleasure and joy, rather than a sour-minded duty aimed at procreation science. We’re vulnerable, even though our sex talk is spicey rather than hard-core. They start with the kiddy porn, they move onto bondage and gays, and we’re next to be nailed.

And, with this post, we’re publishing material critical of a government, mentioning bombs and tanks and abortion in the same cyberbreath. That’s it. We’re noticed.

Hard-core government censorship is such a great idea. First Australia, then Canada, tomorrow the world.

As Neil Gaiman said, “…if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.”

My GF Sez raises two determined hands. One each. We’re holding the others.

Luckily the Internet isn’t quite so easily controlled.

John Gilmore’s famous quote, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” remains applicable. No one body owns or administers the internet. I’m not sure how it works, but I suspect nobody does. It works, it moves around, it avoids control, it runs on offshore sites when domestic regulation is tough. It twitters out of Iran, it downloads in Pirate Bay, it blogs out of Baghdad.

Like Cerberus, the mythical monster of the Victorian underworld, if one head is hacked off, three more spring up in its place. The internet works around censorship. The internet continues to function, to grow, to survive and prosper.

But remember, the internet isn’t some faceless government agency. It’s us. It’s supply and demand. Hold up your hands, fight for your rights, stick it out for your art nudes, your leather and chains, your same-sex erotica. Because if you give up, it’s Disney and the Mormons deciding what you can access online.

–Guy Sez

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