Titty Wallpaper: Remember the days when you actually used your mobile phone company’s content service? To get wallpapers or ringtones (why would you), or bikini babes (dork), or titty wallpaper?

The current system regulating internet and mobile content seems stuck back then, right about when ringtones became polyphonic.

It ignores one simple thing. Um. You can get the internet on your phone now. The code promises to ‘regulate in a manner that will readily accommodate technological change’, but already it appears out-moded by mobile phones with 3G capability.

Does that mean Conroy should ask telcos to do what ISPs will have to do? Filter the internet?

Right now, if you want your mobile provider (Optus, Vodaphone and so on) to get you titty wallpaper, you have to tell them, you have to ‘opt in’. That means if you want to see anything rated MA right through to R18.

But hang on. Isn’t that button there a web browser? Can’t I just look up… oh yes… here we go… I could wallpaper my entire apartment with this amount of titty wallpaper from my mobile phone. And I haven’t had to ‘opt in’ or anything. It all seems a bit blind to the fact that the internet will soon be everywhere. To shut kids up in the back of the car. On portable pads. In fact, on every mobile device we’re going to use.

Does that mean the government should force telecommunications companies to filter things at the source too, like the ISPs? Since telcos are providing 3G?

Making a list, checking it twice. Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice.

Have you ever thought, ‘I really think Americans are whack-jobs on abortion and euthanasia’? Or, ‘the UK really does go ga-ga about child abuse stories in the press’?

Under the government’s filtering proposal, the US or the UK or any number of other as-yet-unnamed countries could set an agenda for what gets blocked here in Australia. And you may never know.

OK. Let’s break that down. In Conroy’s proposed mandatory net filter, RC (“Refused Classification”) sites are blocked. Those RC sites (presumably) will be listed in a… list (modeled, one would assume, on the existent ACMA blacklist; but smaller, just the really nasty shit that’s too violent, oinky, jihady or young). But it wouldn’t only be this blacklist that gets blocked. According to the Minister, other lists (more lists!) supplied by other international agencies will be added too.

In Conroy’s announcement before Christmas, he says,

‘The Government will also add the specific internet addresses (URLs) of known child abuse material through sharing lists with highly regarded international agencies after an assessment of the rigour and accountability of classification processes used by these agencies’.

Read it again. Why don’t we add a few more nice things to that assessment process: ‘political neutrality’? ‘Transparency’? ‘Governments we like’?

A few more questions spring to mind. Which counties? Which agencies? What does ‘highly regarded’ mean in this context? (do they make a good, solid list the way we do?) Using what political mechanism will these agencies inform our censors? (a quick phone call?) How secure will this be?

More importantly. How will their ‘rigour’ and ‘accountability’ be assessed? By whom? Will Australians know about this process when it happens? Will the agencies consulted be working only in the area of ‘child abuse material’, or have the mandate to root out other offensive material on the internet, too?

Answers to these questions would be good. Because it’s easy to imagine a scenario where this kind of thing comes undone. Remember the rage about Bill Henson? Whoa, politicised. A whole working group (Child Pornography Working Party) was set up to nut out problems with the NSW legislation. Now there are brand new recommendations to cut the artistic defence from charges of child pornography in NSW. That’s what I mean by political. Not just a bunch of gasbagging. Actual political change.

So here’s my hypothetical. It’s not unimaginable that something like that could happen in the States. What if child abuse material was reclassified due to public pressure to conform to the political agenda of the day? What if an American agency began feeding the Australian Government Censors with new lists, new definitions, new classifications, because of the reactionary views aired on the talk-show circuit in America? How would we calibrate those lists with ours? How much would this process cost to check that these URLs are not politicised?

Am I being paranoid? Is the world conspiring against me? Who’s that man?

Child porn is child porn is child porn, I hear you say. But a mandatory filtering system demands an even higher level of transparency about who defines what, especially with other countries involved.