If love is directly proportional to the length of time you spend with someone then my soul mate is the internet. It’s sad but it’s true. I spend more time with the internet than I do with my girlfriend and the internet never asks me to make it dinner or take my feet off the table.
I mean, judging from our daily eight hour rendezvous I should have proposed years ago and maybe now that we know each other so well, I should start thinking about getting the internet pregnant. I’m just at that point in my life where it makes sense to settle down you know?
I guess it’s the same way for a lot of people. I’m by no means an overly positive guy but I love everything about the internet. The way it greets me in the morning, the way it’s made me a better human being and those little moments you know? Those little in-jokes we share, the internet and I. The daily stuff that you can take for granted. The LOLs. Sure the web can be annoying like when I receive sixty emails and fifty-eight of them turn out to be spammers spruiking Russian brides and pulsating members but to be perfectly honest I’ve come to love those imperfections. I want to shout it from the rooftops, I want to write it in the sky, I want to take out an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald just so the world knows how I feel – I LOVE YOU INTERNET!
OK you get it. I’m weird and love the internet like it’s a real person but maybe then you’ll understand why a mandatory filtering system for Internet Service Providers in Australia is the worst idea ever. Like any relationship you have to take the bad with the good, Ryan Gosling taught me that. But if online censorship proceeds, the Government will be drawing the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate content for us – the (apparently) mindless Australian public. Besides the fact that censorship is no way to curb unwanted behaviour, people will always find a way to access illegal content if they so please.
Subject matter which falls under the Government’s “Refused Classification” includes child sex abuse content, bestiality, sexual violence and the detailed instruction of crime. All understandable content grey areas but in a document leaked earlier this year legal sites such as Wikipedia articles and Youtube videos as well sites for online poker, satanism, regular gay and straight porn and instructions for drug use may also be blocked.
If the Censorship goes ahead 3.4% of content on the internet will be filtered and it’s likely that no one reading this article would visit those sites anyway. The issue is with the hundreds of millions of dollars required to implement the system and more importantly our right to choose what is and isn’t appropriate content. Especially if you’re a Satan worshiping gambler who wants to learn about the effects of Cannabis.
