FED: Australia a global village idiot, US lawyer agrees

AAP General News (Australia)
08-23-1999
FED: Australia a global village idiot, US lawyer agrees

By Ilsa Colson

MELBOURNE, Aug 23 AAP - Federal government Internet censorship laws are draconian and
repressive and made Australia 'the global village idiot' according to a leading US civil
libertarian.

Civil Liberties Union president Professor Nadine Strossen criticised the laws as vague and
susceptible to injection with the values of those enforcing them ans should be reversed.

He agreed the new laws made Australia "the global village idiot".

The new laws, effective from January 1, demand Internet service-providers in Australia
block "anything that offends against the standards of morality, decency and propriety
generally accepted by reasonable adults".

"We are profoundly concerned in the United States about what's happening in this country in
terms of restricting the Net," Prof Strossen, considered amongst America's most influential
lawyers, said in Melbourne.

"I will cite the (anti-censorship) Electronic Frontiers of Australia which has said
Australia is now looking like the global village idiot."

Prof Strossen urged Australians, who have the highest percentage of Internet usage in the
world after the US, to pressure the government to overturn the laws.

"I hope that Australian government officials will mirror what I understand public opinion
polls to indicate here, which is that the vast majority of the public does not support these
laws," she told reporters.

"There is no way of drawing a distinction (between what should and shouldn't be banned)
that is meaningful and coherent other than allowing each individual to decide exactly what it
is that he or she doesn't want to see."

Ironically, however, there might be "some in the commercial sector in the United States who
would rejoice" at Australia's new laws because they could send businesses such as
service-providers to the US.

Prof Strossen said all countries should be concerned at what was going on with regard to
the Internet in other countries.

". . .By definition, we're all in this together and censorial action by one government
official in one remote corner of the world has direct and sometimes adverse effects everywhere
else."

Prof Strossen said the argument that children had to be protected from some Internet
material - one heavily depended on by the Australian government to support its new laws - had
been rejected by the US Supreme Court.

". . . The technology is such that you cannot censor it for children without censoring it
for everybody," she said.

The Internet should not be censored because it was "potentially the most empowering, the
most enlightening, the most liberating tool for individual self-realisation, as well as for
democratisation," she said.

Professor Strossen was in Australia to address a seminar on Censorship versus Freedom of
Speech on the Internet.

AAP imc/er/trm

KEYWORD: INTERNET

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