Ogre Forums

The Australian Law Reform commision will be closing submissions on the current Australian classification scheme on the 15th of July. So this is the last chance to get in and add your two cents on how movies, games and the internet should be censored.

http://www.alrc.gov.au/content/classifi ... submission

My own submission basically said compulsory classification and censorship should be scrapped completely, and that the main focus should be to provide a government certified "suitable for children" classification instead, so responsible parents can use that as a guide for their children. Other stuff need not really be government classified at all. Protect the kiddies, but let adults read/play/watch what they want, obviously not including real child porn and torture snuff. Compulsory internet filtering is also a bad idea.

At the very least, we need an R18+ category for games.

Maybe a little bit Off-Topic but:

Recently Turkish Goverment passed a new legislation which will be active at the end of August, what it says is:

All Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must provide the following 4 categories without any extra charge:
1 - Suitable for Children (Only Sites on the Government's WHITE LIST are allowed)
2 - Family Category (Sites on Government's BLACK LIST and whatever ISPs see fit are blocked, all the rest non-blocked, Sites on WHITE LIST can not be blocked)
3 - Country Category (Only Turkish Sites are allowed)
4 - Free Category (no blocking at all)

- All users are given option to belong to one of the categories above on registration for the service, if non is selected, the default is Category 4 (Free Category)
- Any user can switch categories on the fly at any time using a password protected Web Site

Now guess what? There has been many people protesting the government, claiming that they are trying to limit their freedom... Strange huh?

stealth977 wrote:Now guess what? There has been many people protesting the government, claiming that they are trying to limit their freedom... Strange huh?

Indeed. Without having given it a lot of thought, I like the idea as long as everyone is free to switch the categories and there is still an open option to get access to everything.

I think the "suitable for children" category is a good idea. That was my idea for Australia, although I said it should be at the PC level, not the ISP level. The problem with the other categories, and with having them at the ISP level, is that it sets up the infrastructure for the government to later on just switch off the Free Category. I'd be surprised if that isn't the Turkish plan.

ISP level blocking is inherently open to abuse, since there's no way for the citizen to get around it if they decide to make it compulsory. If there's no plan to block it, why not offer it as a end-user PC filter instead?