Australia

The Broadcasting Services Act, which came into force on 1 January 2000, spells out material to be banned from websites, including pornography involving children, bestiality, excessive violence, real sex acts and information about crime, violence and drug use. The arbiter of this is the regulatory Australian Broadcasting Authority (ABA), which asks the ISPs of sites concerned to take reasonable steps to bar access to them. Civil liberty groups oppose these restrictions, as well as the obligation of ISPs to offer content filters to their customers. Most ISPs are refusing to comply and simply list sites that provide such products. In October 2001, the Cybercrime Act came into effect, allowing judges to force suspects to reveal their encryption codes. A few months later, the federal senate, rejected an amendment to the telecommunications law that would have allowed the security services to intercept e-mail without court permission. Eight major international media - including Yahoo!, CNN, Reuters and The Guardian - said on 28 May 2002 they would give legal support to an appeal by the Dow Jones US media group to the High Court against a libel conviction. The plaintiff was Australian businessman Joseph Gutnick, who said he had been libelled in an article on the website of the group's Barrons magazine. The Victoria state supreme court, saying the article could be read in the state, convicted Dow Jones, whose lawyer warned that the ruling was a serious precedent that would threaten the online media worldwide. In November 2002, the ABA refused to censor three anti-globalisation sites that called on demonstrators against a World Trade Organisation meeting in Sydney that month to equip themselves with baseball bats and gas-masks. The authorities, especially the police, had asked for the censorship on grounds it was clear incitement to physically attack the police. The government responded to the ABA's refusal by moving to set up a centre to combat high tech crime. The daily newspaper The Courier-Mail said it would give the federal government power to censor websites directly. Links: Electronic Frontier Australia, on Internet censorship The Australian Broadcasting Authority Zdnet on new technology