[Copy of email sent to ISOC-AU members list by Jeremy Malcolm]

The Broadcasting Services Act is the Commonwealth statute that regulates the content that Australians may host on the Internet.

Since the passage of amendments to that Act on 28 June 1999, which commenced in January of the following year, Australian Internet users have been subject to restrictions on the Australian Internet content that they may access, that are equivalent to the restrictions in place on films.

Leaving aside broader questions of the suitability of the film classification regime, ISOC-AU does not believe that Internet content should be classified or regulated in the same way as films. If you agree that it is time for a review of the Broadcasting Services Act to re-assess the suitability of the regulation of Internet content (including textual content) by reference to standards developed for motion pictures, we ask that you consider protesting on 28 June 2002.

The protest is suitable for participation by anyone who maintains a Web site, and does not require that you have administrative access to the server on which the Web site is hosted, nor the ability to run CGI scripts. All that is required is that you add the following to the HTML code of the front page of your Web site on 28 June 2002:

popup.txt

The inclusion of this code will cause visitors to your Web page to be redirected to ISOC-AU’s call for a review of the Broadcasting Services Act. At the bottom of that page is a link to close the ISOC-AU window and to return the user to your Web site, being the page that they were originally expecting to see.

If you have any difficulties you may contact me for a fuller explanation. We hope that as many people as possible will join in and modify their Web sites in the manner suggested on 28 June 2002, in order to demonstrate to the Government the depth of concern in the Internet community about shortcomings in Australia’s Internet content regulation regime.

Let’s do this thing.

Our Luddite Government needs to know how pathetic they’re being.