Info/Law

One beneficial side effect of Internet filtering is that it points up quirks in how countries make content decisions: what’s blacklisted, and why? The Sydney Morning Herald reports that Australia’s proposed Internet censorship system (currently in its second phase of testing) will block access to on-line and downloadable games that aren’t MA-15 or milder. This is due to a sharp break in the rating scale Australia uses to rate games: they’re either MA15+ or below, or they’re Refused Classification. The black list of sites to be filtered on a mandatory basis is, at the moment, restricted to RC material. So, you can have a magazine that’s R18 and buy it if you’re an adult, but you can’t play a game that would earn the equivalent rating.

This might be useful in getting Australia to reform its content classification system, which has some weird dichotomies in evaluating on-line vs. off-line material, and in dealing with different media for the same content. This particular quirk, though, seems like it’s vulnerable to gamesmanship: if I were an Australian gaming company, I’d surely submit complaints about my competitors’ games (especially foreign ones) – censorship could help my sales by eliminating alternatives.

Fun stuff. Hat tip to Boing Boing.

Filed under: Blogging, Digital Media, Filtering, ISP, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Media, Software, Virtual Worlds, international