On the Death of the Clean Feed

[kirby1024]

So yes, I'm obviously pleased as punch that the cards have lined up just so in order to stop the government from continuing with the Clean Feed.

But I have one, teensy little question.

Why, pray tell, did it have to take an unholy alliance of Liberals and Greens and Xenophon to put this thing down?

The government's own feasibility reports showed that in order to do what the government wanted, it would have to slow down Internet access in Australia by an absurd amount, and even then wouldn't even kill the main distribution channels by which the offending material gets shared on.

But they kept going on regardless.

No poll on the Clean feed from anyone showed a majority of Australians supported it. Huge swaths of child-rights groups, censorship groups, technology groups, citizens groups and other special interest groups were yelling at the government that they were doing it wrong.

But they kept going on regardless.

At every single step, the government was told "This Is Wrong, It Will Not Work, Don't Do This", and yet at every step they kept going.

What. The. Hell.

Comments

[aeduna.livejournal.com]

*cough* copyright lobbyists *cough*

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

May I kindly ask for an elaboration? I can think of a couple of things you might mean, but can't narrow it down any further...

Follow the money

[aeduna.livejournal.com]

So, before the election, it was all "protect the children".

After the election, it turns out there's two lists, one for Moral Police you could opt out of, and one for 'illegal' items. Want to bet that 'illegal' for the most part in this case means "bittorrenting tv shows/movies"?

I'm seeing a situation where ARIA and similar folks are pushing the Rudd government hard to go ahead with their plans. They have the motive and the cash.

Re: Follow the money

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

I would almost have thought, then, that the copyright lobbyists would have lobbied both side of parliament throughout the debacle and hedged their bets. Not like they don't have the attention span to do it. Yet, the Opposition is doing quite well at having a backbone on this issue.

Although I did find it eeenteresting when I read this in a SMH article:

ACMA's secret blacklist, which will form the basis of the mandatory censorship regime, contains 1370 sites, only 674 of which relate to depictions of children under 18. A significant portion - 506 sites - would be classified R18+ and X18+, which is legal to view but would be blocked for everyone under the proposal.

This week Senator Conroy said there was "a very strong case for blocking" other legal content that has been "refused classification". According to the classification code, this includes sites depicting drug use, crime, sex, cruelty, violence or "revolting and abhorrent phenomena" that "offend against the standards of morality".

And last month, ACMA added an anti-abortion website to its blacklist because it showed photographs of what appears to be aborted foetuses. The Government has said it was considering expanding the blacklist to 10,000 sites and beyond.

I mean, we know that the Labor Right is in control of government at the moment... Is this someone in Labor trying to go covert moral guardian? That might explain the zealousness of the project. But that alone doesn't seem to cover it...

Re: Follow the money

[aeduna.livejournal.com]

There's always some section of any given group of people that wants to be the moral guardian, so I would't be surprised to find that was a component.

I suspect the Opposition have a policy already for this, and are better off maintaining that position in the light of all the hostility.

Re: Follow the money

[http://users.livejournal.com/_sabik_/]

Ooh! Ooh! Can I be moral guardian?!!1!?

η

Re: Follow the money

[goatsfoot.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm an expert on it, but didn't they only intend to block port 80 traffic, at least for now, which excludes P2P? They would have blocked every torrent search engine they could have found though, not of course that that would have done ANYTHING, especially to inbuilt search engine protocols such as ed2k.

Copyright lobbyists have a pretty strong influence, it's pretty scary in the US, and how they influenced pulling down of thepiratebay for a short time without legal jurisdiction.

Ugh. Good riddance to the no clean feed. I can stop papering my local cafe now.

[originaluddite.livejournal.com]

Unholy? Just the way we like it.

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

I dunno. I find it rare that Greens and Liberals agree on anything these days, although I'm sure it'll happen more often with Labor in charge...

[kriyanna.livejournal.com]

Why? because it was K-Rudd's pet project.

Why'd they keep going? Well, actually that's a bit of a lie to think they kept pushing it on. It just seemed like they kept going on regardless. Reality: it just got tied up in government style bureaucratic red tape, plain ole waiting. They couldn't say yes or no until they had a feasibility study completed by an external service.... and in the meantime, media had a rampage. So.

This Is Wrong, It Will Not Work, Don't Do This

[thornelawler.livejournal.com]

Apart from the 'this was one of K-Rudd's babies' suggestion, I'd speculate:

If you're a government, you may well become so inured to people shouting "UR DOIN IT WRONG! U SUCK!" as to be effectively deaf to it, just so you can continue to do anything at all. This is obviously a Bad Thing.

I see this being a risk for Obama down the road as much as it has been for Rudd so far: If you take power on a wave of worshipful hysteria, say because you ousted some total asshole, it is way too easy to believe your own hype. No matter how good your intentions are to start with, they become destructive when you stop listening to feedback because you know you're right.

[hanshin.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard any news on the clean feed thing being officially shut down, you're the only person I've seen mention it. When did this happen and how?

Excuse my ignorance, but did it get voted against in parliament or something along those lines?

(Not that I'm doubting you of course, just after clarification <3 )

[kirby1024.livejournal.com]

See this article.

What has happened is that the Liberal's lawyers have come back with the recommendation to the Coalition that in order for Rudd to do what he wants to do with the Clean Feed, Legislation will need to be enacted. They had previously resolved to vote against any such legislation in the Senate anyway, but this advice now indicates to them that non-legislative avenues are not available to the Government. The Greens were always against it, and most recently, Independent Nick Xenophon has come out saying that he has changed his mind regarding the clean feed and decided that he cannot support it. This means there is a majority of Senators in the Upper house against the Clean Feed.

Thus, it appears that all possible avenues available to Rudd and his government to put the Clean Feed into action are now closed to them. Rudd can continue to go through the motions, but so long as the Parliament retains it's current consistency, it cannot pass into law.