Internet engineer Mark Newton has published a followup to his earlier letter and meeting with his MP, Government Frontbencher Kate Ellis. Many of our members and the public have written to their MPs about this issue and have been frustrated with the responses they have been getting, which are basically boilerplate containing the same misleading assertions they were complaining about in the first place.

EFA has been supportive of Mark’s credible and well-reasoned activism against the filtering proposal, and his latest letter continues in this theme. He raises a point that has concerned us and many others, the still ambiguous nature of what is to go on the secret blacklist:

It is further interesting to note that the Minister has now added the term “unwanted” to his rhetoric, after having had it pointed out that the ACMA blacklist he keeps waving about is not actually a list of “illegal” material . I trust you will agree that his replacement term, “illegal and unwanted,” reinforces community concerns about the scope of the ALP’s proposal, especially given that the Minister has refused to clarify what, exactly, the new term means, and who gets to decide what is “unwanted.” 

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Filed in: Censorship

A recent article reports that the discussion paper on whether Australia should introduce an R18+ rating for video games is not likely to be released.

Australia is the only Western country without an R rating for computer and video games. If a game is deemed unsuitable for MA15+ by the Office of Film and Literature Classification, it is refused classification and cannot be sold. Titles including 50 Cent, Bulletproof, Postal 2, Leisure Suit Larry, NARC, Singles, Blitz: The League, and Manhunt have all been refused classification in recent years. In 2008 alone, four game titles have been banned: Silent Hill, Fallout 3, Dark Sector and Shellshock 2. (Edit: as Liam points out, Fallout 3 was edited in response to the Australian ban, and has since been released in a cut down form here and worldwide.)

According to recent surveys, the average age of gamers in Australia is around 30 years old. The lack of an R18+ rating for games hurts both Australian adults and Australian developers.

An R18+ classification would require the unanimous support of all Attorneys-General, and in the past moves to change the current classification have been blocked on the vote of a single state Attorney-General. This appears to have happened once again. EFA has now launched a campaign to help Australian gamers to lobby their Attorney-General. It is our hope that public discussion on this issue will not be stifled by the unsupported views of one politician.

Filed in: Censorship

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by Dale Clapperton

A question that has been asked a lot recently is this: can Labor implement their ‘clean feed’ proposal without legislative amendments?

Much turns on the answer to this question.  To get any legislation through the Senate at the moment, Labor require the support of either the Coalition, or all seven of the other Senators (five Greens, plus Steve Fielding and Nick Xenophon).  If the Coalition oppose the legislation, any one of those other Senators voting against it will ensure its defeat.  The Coalition look like they will oppose it, and Senator Scott Ludlam from the Greens was hostile to it in a Senate committee hearing earlier this week, so at this point there appears to be a decent chance that legislative reforms to implement ‘clean feed’ wouldn’t get through the Senate.

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by Nic Suzor

Today I attended a briefing session on ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement ) hosted by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT). I felt it was a good meeting, and I really got the sense that DFAT were interested in public participation. There was a good deal of frustration on both sides of the fence – participants expressed serious concerns about the lack of transparency in the negotiating process, and DFAT consistently repeated that they were bound by confidentiality agreements and could not divulge details of the draft text of the agreement. Participants in the Tokyo round of negotiations agreed that the full text of the agreement will only be made available after negotiations have been concluded and the text finalised. Understandably, there were a number of members of the audience who were hesitant to accept any of DFAT’s assurances as to the content of the agreement without access to the negotiation documents.

Overall, whilst I think that the process is far too secretive, DFAT appear to have gone a long way to make available what they can, and they seem genuinely interested in hearing from interested parties in Australia. Unfortunately, input will be limited (blind) until negotiations are complete and the text finalised, but DFAT assures us that they are considering the issues thoroughly and there will be genuine opportunity to debate whether or not to sign at the end of the process.

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Filed in: Copyright, Privacy

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EFA has lodged a submission on the National Broadband Network proposal. In our submission to a Senate Select Committee investigating the proposal we argued that the proposed Fibre To The Node (FTTN) model would most likely grant further monopoly power to Telstra because it would require drastic modifications to Telstra’s existing copper infrastructure through which most landline calls to domestic premises are currently carried, modifications which only Telstra would want to perform. We concluded that the benefits of a FTTN network do not outweigh the costs, and a FTTN network should not proceed. However, if an FTTN network is deployed, it is critical that its operator be structurally separated from the telecommunications carriers selling retail services.

Read EFA’s submission (PDF)

Filed in: Consumer Issues

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On Saturday 20 September 2008, EFA Board Member Colin Jacobs and EFA Chair Dale Clapperton will speak at the Software Freedom Day event to be held in Melbourne, Australia.  Starting at 11am, Colin will speak on the Rudd government’s current ‘clean feed’ Internet censorship agenda, and present a comparative analysis of ‘clean feed’ against other Internet censorship regimes around the world.

Dale will discuss legal and policy issues of importance to open software and open software developers, including copyright, contract, and competition law, including recent cases in Australia and the United States of America, and the development of the secretive and worrying ‘Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement’ (ACTA).

Colin & Dale’s presentations will be interactive and participatory, and time permitting, will be followed by a Q&A session.  They look forward to the opportunity to meet EFA members and supporters at this significant event.

Filed in: Censorship, Copyright, General

Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today labelled a recent government trial of ISP-based Internet filtering a failure.

The recently released ACMA report entitled “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering” showed that of the six unnamed ISP-based filters evaluated:

• One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was *not* performing filtering;
• Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
• The most accurate filters were often the slowest;
• All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked; and
• All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested.

Despite this report highlighting the inaccuracy of these filters and the loss of performance caused by their use, Senator Conroy announced the government will press ahead with a real-world pilot program in furtherance of Labor’s pre-election commitment to force all Australian ISP’s to filter their customers’ Internet access.
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Filed in: Censorship, Media Releases

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EFA today lodged a submission with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), opposing a recently announced plan by online auction site eBay to require all Australian buyers and sellers to use PayPal for eBay purchases in most circumstances.

Many eBay buyers and sellers have very valid reasons for preferring not to use PayPal.  Their choice of payment method should not be overridden by eBay in the name of commercial expediency or increased profits.

EFA believes that eBay’s proposed changes are without any substantive public benefits, and that any public benefits that may result would be outweighed by the harm to competition and consumers resulting from the changes.  EFA further believes that eBay’s proposed changes may constitute a misuse of market power, contrary to s 46(1) of the Trade Practices Act 1974.

Filed in: Consumer Issues