Senator MARGETTS (7:52 PM) —The Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill brings a new category into the regime administered by the Australian Broadcasting Authority: online services. Online services are being added to a regime that was established to regulate various types of broadcasting. But, online services are not broadcasts.

The Internet is not television, it is not radio and it is not film. It can be all those things, but it is also much more. It is telephone, encyclopedia, meeting place and communication tool. It provides recreation, relaxation and stimulation. It breaks down barriers of distance between city and country. It connects people worldwide. It allows people to do business in ways they have never been able to before and with people they have not dealt with before. In effect, it makes everyone anywhere a potential customer. Clearly it has enormous potential.

But, like any powerful technology, it will have its down side. In the case of the Internet, the downside is said to be the availability of offensive material and the exposure of children to that material. It is this offensive material and material unsuitable for children that the bill seeks to regulate. `What's wrong with that?' you may ask. There is no shortage of arguments about freedom of speech and parental responsibility for what children access. But I will leave it to others to make out those arguments. Instead of arguing against the aim of the bill, I will concentrate on its effect.

The fundamental problem with this bill is that it seeks to treat the Internet as though it were just an extension of existing broadcasting media. In fact, it is different in a number of ways which make this approach to regulation unlikely to work. One difference is that television and radio, whether national, commercial, community or whatever, are broadcast from a single source. The fact that there are relatively few service providers—TV or radio stations—makes it quite feasible to regulate the content. Once a system of classification is in place, the regulator can classify the relatively small number of programs, and the broadcasters tend to stick within the rules because they have enormous investments to protect. The same goes for film. A relatively small number of films come onto the market and they are classified. It is not in the inter ests of distributors or cinemas to buck the system.

The Internet is a different scene altogether. Instead of being a one-way broadcaster to receiver system, it is interactive. Instead of being a passive recipient, the `viewer' engages with the medium and with the material on the medium. The user of the Internet may be creating and consuming Internet content at the same time.

This makes for a much more complex environment with a much more complex series of relationships between the players. With television or film, you have a relatively stable small group of producers and broadcasters making content for a mass market. With the Internet the barriers to entry are low, so the number of participants involved in creating and distributing material is enormous. Techniques which work quite comfortably for regulating a few major corporations no longer apply when dealing with such diversity. Also, these participants could be located anywhere in the world; this leads to further complication for would-be regulators.

Television, radio and film can be regulated for content because there are a relatively small, finite number of distributors and high barriers to market entry. In effect, the regulator is dealing with manageable chunks of content to be distributed by a small number of key players. It is worth doing because the content is available to anyone who happens to turn on their TV.

On the Internet we are not dealing with manageable amounts of content. The volume of material on the net is already overwhelming, and it is growing exponentially. We are not dealing with a small number of producers or distributors. In fact, anyone with a computer and a modem can be a producer, and anyone with a bit of know-how and a small capital outlay can be a distributor—an Internet service provider. In a sense, the bill recognises this. It does not seek to legislate to classify material before it can be put on the net. Instead, it seeks to put the onus on the distributors. But here again it is missing the point. The distributors are providing access to `the highway'.

The highway is the information superhighway, but the analogy with the road system works quite well. There are far too many vehicles on the highway for anyone to check the contents of all vehicles and exclude material that is illegal. We do not make it mandatory for the department of main roads to search the cars and pockets of all drivers out on the road to ensure that no prohibited items are travelling on the road. Yet, this is essentially what we are doing when we put the onus on the Internet service provider.

To ensure that prohibited items do not travel on the road, we say that it is illegal to drive with explosives or drugs. If information comes along that someone has those things in their vehicle or waiting for them at their destination, do we get the department of main roads to close down that stretch of road or the path to that destination? No, what we do is get the police to go after the real culprit.

Essentially, that is what happens now with illegal material or activity on the Internet. It is illegal to make child pornography; it is illegal to distribute child pornography; and it is illegal to download or print off images of child pornography, whether coming from the Internet or anywhere else. The people doing these things are the culprits and it is they who should be prosecuted, not the people who provide the pathways that are used.

The analogy more commonly employed is with other `carriers' like Telstra, Australia Post, couriers and so on. There is plenty of material that is unsuitable for children which gets sent through the post. Should it be checked by the carrier on the basis that it might get opened by a child looking at mummy and daddy's mail? The idea that the carrier should be held responsible for censoring the content of their customer's mail or phone calls is—as Michael Warby in the Canberra Times of 24 May, today, said—`absolutely outrageous and ludicrously expensive'.

The bill will do exactly that for Internet service providers. The bill requires providers to `take down' material or block access to material that has been the subject of complaint. Service providers have 24 hours in which to comply, and the penalties for non-compliance are horrendous.

The opportunities for abuse that this presents are manifold. Services of a particular provider could be targeted to drive them out of business. Even without such malicious intent, many smaller providers will simply go out of business because of the extra workload or because they are unable to comply in time and will get hit with big fines. Some will just go quietly out of business rather than get involved in the complexities of meeting the demands of increased regulation.

The Internet is notoriously anarchic. This is one of its great strengths. For many of the participants, this attempt at censorship will cause them to move overseas to more congenial regulatory environments. This applies particularly to operators of host sites. Why would anyone host a site in Australia, where regulation requires hands-on management of content, when they could do the same thing offshore and not have to worry about paying for classification or monitoring of content?

The government says the measures are subject to the proviso that they be technologically feasible and commercially viable. But what is commercially viable for Telstra Big Pond may drive smaller players out of business—and could it be that this is what they want? Is this perhaps the intention? Is the government looking after its mates at the big end of town? Surely not.

There is no shortage of industry groups that point out that blocking of content will not work. The CSIRO report which has already been referred to in debate concludes that content blocking implemented purely by technological means will be ineffective. Work-arounds will quickly be devised for any technologically based blocking system and distributed over the Internet instead. This is hardly surprising. The Internet was developed to provide communication in the aftermath of nuclear war. If it would survive nuclear war it would certainly survive attempts by Australian regulators to block off bits of it.

The bill employs two methods of restricting access. The first is a blacklist of banned sites. If a complaint is made about a site, an interim take-down notice is issued and the provider has to close off access to that site and similar material. The site is listed and all providers have to refuse access to the site. This means that any effort to access sites on the Internet will require the provider to check that the site is not on the banned list. By putting another stage in the process of accessing legitimate sites, we slow down the operation of the Net and therefore add to the costs. This really is like shooting yourself in the foot. Every business transaction, every research query and every visit to a game site will be checked against the banned list. The effect will be to make Australia a slightly slower place to do business or to study.

The second way of restricting access is the use of filtering technology. Filtering technology has an important part to play in management of the Internet. It is particularly useful for families who want to limit children's access. It probably does not matter to a particular end user if the filter takes out access to breast cancer sites at the same time as it takes out access to rude bits. But the use of crude filters—and they are necessarily crude—should not be expected of Internet service providers. People who do need access to material that triggers key word filtering will not be able to get it; at least they will not get it easily. They will have to play around with filter evading technology or just move to an Internet service provider based offshore—more loss of business to the Australian economy and the industry.

The arguments can be summed up quite simply. First, it will not work. The Internet is resistant to censorship, which it interprets as damage and finds a way around. Second, it will be expensive. This applies to the added cost of access, the management of blacklists and filters, and the economic cost of decreased competition as small players are driven from the market. It also applies to increased costs for the end user in both time and money. Third, it is a blunt instrument. In attempting to block offensive material, much of value will also be unavailable. Fourth, it isolates Australia. Canada has just concluded a 10-month study of Internet regulation and has decided against new laws. The company Australia will keep in censoring the Internet is not good company.

These arguments have all been widely canvassed elsewhere—at the Senate committee, in the minority reports of the committee, and in correspondence which all senators will have received on this bill. But there is another problem which I do not believe has had the attention it deserves. The bill actually has the potential to militate against prosecution of the producers and users of offensive material. Under the proposed regime, someone complaining of unsuitable material would complain to the Australian Broadcasting Authority, which would issue a banning notice. The address is then circulated to all Internet service providers, which would be required to block the site. Essentially, the problem then becomes one of `out of sight—out of mind'. Note it is `out of sight' not `out of site'. The site is still there; you just cannot see it in Australia.

What happens to, say, ongoing police investigations of the site? What happens to efforts to track down the people behind it? Sure, there is the possibility for police to satisfy the ABA holding off taking action which might prejudice a criminal investigation. But that assumes a degree of continuous information sharing with all Australian police forces and the ABA, which is quite unprecedented. The police would need to know all the sites the ABA were considering banning, or the ABA would need to know all the investigations currently being undertaken by police. Either way, it would be a logistic nightmare. In the meantime, pornographers and would-be bomb makers carry on with their activities. We do not have policing resources to waste like that. The efforts should be aimed at prosecuting offenders, not imposing constraints on the carrier of the signal.

The final point I wish to make on this bill is that it neglects a deep-seated belief that it is the individual who has responsibility for what they do and what they see on the Internet. It is not the business of government to get on the Net in a heavy-handed way to try to dictate what we can and cannot see or do. It is the responsibility of parents to ensure that their children are not accessing unsuitable material. It is not the role of government to be the parents of the rest of us. That is effectively what this bill does. It treats Australians like children and tells us that government knows best. Government, in this case, may not know best. Government has got it badly wrong on this one and, if the bill is passed by the Senate, the Internet itself will prove just how wrong. That is the nature of the beast. In the meantime, Australia will be held up as a laughing stock, and Senator Alston is, I believe, accurately portrayed as the King Canute of our time, blithely trying to turn back the tide.

I would like to indicate that the Greens (WA) will be supporting the second reading amendment which is, I believe, to be moved by Senator Bishop.