Flickr Creative Commons | Alex E Proimos

While the rest of the world enjoys the epic battle between internet search giant Google and Communist colossus China over internet censorship, Australian free speech activists are this week attempting to shoot down their own government’s compulsory web filter plans.

Any Australians choosing to log on to the internet today instead of spending Australia Day on the beach would have found many of their favourite websites faded to black. Displayed against the dark background is a message opposing the Federal Government’s censorship plans, under which a secret blacklist of objectionable websites would be ‘refused classification’ and Internet Service Providers would be forced to block them.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s Labour government says the aim of the filter is to protect children. China frequently defends its own web censorship, dubbed the ‘Great Firewall of China’, as filtering out violent and pornographic material.

The organisers of the Great Australian Internet Blackout say the filter plan will not work and is a waste of money. They also question what future Australian governments might choose to deem ‘RC’. “Although the Government claims the scope is limited, there are no guarantees on what this or future governments will do with the blacklist once it’s in place,” says the campaign’s spokesman Colin Jacobs.

It will not even protect children, they say: “The filter isn’t a ‘cyber safety’ measure to stop kids seeing inappropriate content such as R and X rated websites. It is not even designed to prevent the spread of illegal material where it is most often found (chat rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing).” Child welfare groups agree and say it would give parents a false sense of security.

Inevitably the list of over 2,000 websites was leaked last year to wikileaks.org and was found to contain such objectionable content as online poker sites, a travel operator, a dentist and Wikipedia pages as well as fetish, satanic and Christian sites.

Iarla Flynn, head of policy at Google Australia wrote last month (before Google’s announcement that it would no longer censor its Chinese language search engine) that the company agreed that child abuse material ought to be screened. “But moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime with a scope that goes well beyond such material is heavy handed and can raise genuine questions about restrictions on access to information.”

Although there are ISP filtering regimes in place in Italy and Germany, they are limited strictly to child abuse and illegal gambling websites. Australia’s law would be “the first of its kind amongst western democracies,” says Flynn.

With Australia’s Green Party opposed, the Labour government will have to rely on the support of the opposition Liberal Party, which is yet to take sides in the RC debate. Could the Liberals be swayed by the blackout protest? Whether or not Australia takes its place aside the likes of China, Iran and Saudi Arabia in ‘protecting’ its citizens from the internet hinges on that question.