Neutering The Net Is About Repression, Not Protection

It seems like only yesterday that the country was prosperous and the Labor Party was going to make everyone’s internet faster.

But now the Federal Government’s great broadband gift is floundering in the waves of the financial crisis and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is pushing ahead with an internet filter that will dramatically slow Australian internet speeds.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority conducted tests earlier this year on six filters that could be imposed on internet service providers. Five slowed internet speeds by at least 20 per cent. And two of them crippled speeds by more than 75 per cent.

And this is before we look at their habit of falsely blocking legal sites. A 1999 trial of internet filtering (censoring the internet has long been a bipartisan goal) even accidentally blocked some government websites. Filters have improved since then but, as ACMA’s test revealed, it is a certainty that some sites will be incorrectly blocked – let’s be honest, the technology to efficiently and effectively censor the internet isn’t quite ready yet.

Nevertheless, technology has a habit of getting better, given enough time. It’s more than just technical issues that makes internet censorship a terrible idea.

Last year, Mr Conroy said that: “If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.” Fair enough. But to claim the filter is designed to eliminate child pornography is too tricksy by half.

After all, child pornography is already illegal. And imposing an elaborate filter on every Australian internet connection is unlikely to have a significant impact on the child pornography trade – as everyone who has sent an email or tried to download a song is aware, there is a bit more to the internet than static web pages. Child pornography isn’t just sitting on openly accessible websites waiting to be downloaded – from what we know about it, it is traded clandestinely by abhorrent individuals. It takes police work and forensics to uncover those sorts of criminals. The dark recesses of the internet won’t be disturbed at all by the new filter.

Who knows, perhaps accusing the entire country of being potential child pornographers polls really well in telephone surveys?

Nevertheless, the biggest problem with the filter isn’t technical and it isn’t its likely failure to reduce child pornography.

The biggest problem is a little word that Mr Conroy slipped out in the middle of a Senate committee hearing. The pilot filter program will not only target the existing blacklisted sites, most of which are child pornography, but will also target “unwanted” content, whatever that means.

The Government has developed a secret list of 10,000 unwanted sites (there are only 1300 on the current blacklist).

But what the Communications Minister wants on the internet and others want on the internet are likely to be two very different things. Nick Xenophon doesn’t want online gambling. Stephen Fielding doesn’t want hardcore pornography and “fetish” material – if Mr Fielding gets to wield his senatorial power over the filter system, expect shares in www.feet.com to slump. If the Government gets the power to control internet content, legal pornography, gambling and violent images will all be candidates for online censorship.

Of course, whenever the censorship of legal material is raised – with its massive implications for freedom of speech in Australia – the Government immediately tries to bring the discussion back to child pornography.

It’s a bit embarrassing that we’re discussing censoring the internet at all. What does it say about Australian politics that the reaction of both major parties to such a liberating technology is to demagogue about its dangers? Our politicians rave about evils online more than any other liberal democracy. As a consequence, the Federal Government’s proposal is far more extensive than any other internet censorship scheme outside the totalitarian world.

There is a certain element of Australian political culture that sees censorship and banning as the panacea to almost every social and policy question. But wowserism dressed up in concerned rhetoric about the sanctity of childhood is still wowserism.

Protecting Kids From TV Swearing Is Not Canberra’s Job

One of the most appealing features of Australian democracy is our enthusiasm for parliamentary committees. Committees are to politicians what Bob the Builder DVDs are to three-year-olds – if a politician is busy with a committee inquiry, then they can’t get up to any mischief.

So it was easy to be happy when it was reported earlier this year that swearing on television shows – which most people would agree is one of the top issues facing Australia today, perhaps second only to jaywalking – was to be investigated by a federal Senate committee.

Sure, it’s an embarrassing waste of taxpayers’ money to have politicians spend their days discussing the need for politeness when responding to complaints about TV programs. But doing so is a lot better than if they spent that time thinking up new taxes. Senators have to do something – let them deliberate over which words shouldn’t be said on TV.

But the final 80-page report released late last month (it took nine senators four months to write) isn’t limited to platitudes and speechifying. It recommends that all new televisions sold in Australia be compelled to offer a “parental lock”, which prevents children from watching programs above a certain classification.

On the surface, this seems like a good idea, doesn’t it? Adding a parental lock to new televisions isn’t likely to cost consumers too much more money.

But is good parenting impossible without help from Canberra?

The parental lock is very similar to a program implemented in the US after a surge in controversy about violence on TV. All TVs sold in that country have to have a V-chip installed that allows parents to block certain shows. (Journalists joked that if the sex-obsessed Republicans had introduced the measure it would have been called the S-chip.)

But while 70 to 80% of American parents claim that they are “seriously concerned” about their children watching inappropriate TV programs, their concern doesn’t extend to actually using the V-chip. In 2004, a Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that only 15% of parents had even tried switching it on. As a consequence, some US politicians have argued that the V-chip should be set at its most restrictive level as its factory default.

It’s easy for parents to claim in a telephone poll that they worry about their kids mimicking the rude words heard on TV. But you have to wonder just how seriously concerned those parents are if it is too much effort to switch on a function that their TV already has built into it. If the US experience is anything to go by, the parental lock will be a flop. And Australian television is already much tamer than TV in the US.

After all, just as you don’t have to buy your children junk food even if they really want it, you don’t have to let your children watch rude programs.

One of the more bizarre reasons the nine senators thought that parents needed help from the Federal Government was because televisions were increasingly being placed in kids’ bedrooms, far from the watchful eye of adults. But perhaps concerned parents could consider simply moving the offending TVs somewhere children don’t sleep.

Indeed, monitoring what TV programs children watch isn’t actually that hard. And for those parents that feel they need some technological help, there are numerous TVs and set-top boxes that already offer parental locks. Is it that hard for parents to inquire about these features when they first buy their TV?

Parents who want to shield their children from the rougher parts of pop culture can easily do so with off-the-shelf technology and simple common sense.

But nevertheless, politicians of all stripes pander to moralising conservative lobbyists for whom the real issue isn’t that their children could hear rude words on TV, but that there are rude words on TV at all. As usual, politicians aren’t actually thinking of the children. Politicians are thinking of marginal electorates.

Perhaps some perspective is needed. Parents and governments won’t have failed if the next generation of Australians lead happy and productive lives, but curse like drunken pirates. Society won’t crumble. The Senate committee should have asked everybody to take it easy – Canberra isn’t a parenting aide.

Free Speech Means The Right To Obscene Speech, Too

The French philosopher Voltaire never actually said the words he is best known for: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” His biographer invented the saying to explain Voltaire’s views on free speech. Still, it’s a great line.

But how many people agree with it? How many people would be willing to go to the barricades for racist, sexist or obscene speech – the sort of stuff that exists only in the deep bowels of the internet? Probably very few.

But if we are concerned about free speech at all, we need to defend some people saying some pretty terrible things.

When debating politics, few people would favour locking up their opponents, no matter how ill-informed or distasteful their views may be. There’s a big difference between strongly disagreeing with somebody’s opinion and insisting that they are banned from expressing it.

The solution to bad speech is simply more speech – one cannot successfully rebut an argument without first allowing that argument to be expressed.

This is the reason that David Marr’s Quarterly Essay – which argued that the Howard government was somehow suppressing dissent – was so popular last year. Political censorship is abhorrent. Almost everybody is happy to let others rant and rave about any political point they like – monarchy, capitalism, foreigners stealing our jobs, the phallocentric patriarchy etc. So there is legitimate anger when the government tries to silence even the most ridiculous opinion about politics.

Nevertheless political censorship is so rare that it is hardly a pressing issue in Australia. Commentators trawl the papers trying to charge the government as an opponent of political dissent. Every possible infringement – real or, more often, imagined – gets highly publicised.

But if we really want to defend free speech in 2008 – if we believe that free speech is a right that we are born with, not a limited gift given to us by politicians – sometimes we may need to make common cause with extreme pornographers, racists, misogynists and other very dislikeable individuals.

Last Tuesday, a 38-year-old Brisbane man, William Reimers, received 12 months probation for possessing five fictional stories about child abuse that he had downloaded from the internet.

Unlike Bill Henson’s famous photographs, there is no ambiguity about the purposes of these stories. With titles like “Daddy’s Best Little Girl”, they were clearly not art. Reimers was charged under laws that consider descriptions of children in sexual activity as child pornography.

Cate Blanchett and her 2020 team will be unlikely to rush to the defence of somebody downloading dirty stories from the internet. But in many ways, Reimers’ arrest is more worrying than the controversy surrounding Henson. Where there are legitimate concerns about Henson’s artistic practice – at what age can somebody “consent” to nude photography? – there are no such concerns with Reimers.

The stories he collected were entirely fictional. In fact, as far as we know, nobody was harmed at any time while they were written, put on the internet, downloaded, or read. And there doesn’t appear to be any indication that the stories were incitements to commit violence. Sure, the stories were the products of a sick mind. But would the arguments presented in the case against Reimers also apply to non-fictional – and non-erotic – descriptions of child abuse? This is a slippery slope.

Having to defend people with repellent views and beliefs is the grimy side of standing up for civil rights. In the US, which has a richer tradition of liberty than Australia, doing so is widely recognised as part of the job. The American Civil Liberties Union has defended not just the uncontroversial rights of religious liberty, immigrant rights and gay rights, but also the rights of neo-Nazis and the Man-Boy Love Association to express their views. Nobody in the union would agree with the views of these groups, but they defend their right to express them.

If we think that the right to free speech stops where perversion starts, then we allow judges and politicians to impose their views of morality upon the rest of us. A right which is limited by the opinions of a conservative legislator is no right at all.

Film Classification Laws Out Of Sync With The 21st Century

With Tim Wilson

Recently a small St Kilda video store, Out Video, drew the attention of the federal Attorney-General’s Department for selling and renting imported titles that have not been classified in Australia. Bureaucrats may be doing their job, but by acting against a small niche video shop, they have inadvertently exposed critical flaws in our film classification laws.

Out Video markets films primarily directed at the gay and lesbian community. Many are produced overseas and never achieve general or selected release in Australia. And because of the prohibitively high cost of classification, they never get classified.

The A-G’s Department contacted Out Video because they were selling and renting out titles not given the all-clear by the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC). As a result, Out Video says nearly half their stock will have to be shelved permanently.

This highlights two major flaws in Australia’s classification regime:

1. The regime has not adapted to a marketplace that allows media to be accessed through more than just domestic broadcasters and distributors. Consumers demand access to an increasingly wide selection of entertainment from overseas, and they can get it through the internet.

2. Our classification laws are not designed to accommodate small markets. Instead, the classification processes are optimised for large, general-release films. The system simply doesn’t lend itself to small-run films, and the law unfairly harms businesses trying to service niche markets.

The targeting of Out Video by the A-G’s Department should give it and the OFLC impetus to review the classification laws. With a vibrant and diverse international entertainment sector, these laws should not blanket-ban content. Such a policy makes a mockery of the liberal legal principle that all things should be legal unless there is a reason to make them illegal.

Many of the films these niche providers import have already been classified in the UK, US and Canada. So one possible solution is to recognise comparable classifications from other media-exporting countries.

But a preferable outcome would be the elimination of mandatory classification. If consumers demanded classification to guide their decisions, then distributors would have a commercial incentive to seek it.

Furthermore, classification need not be the preserve of government. Many private classification regimes exist to rate films on special criteria (the Christian community, for example, has pioneered many alternative rating systems). Under such a regime, films that failed to obtain any form of classification would be burdened with the trepidation of some consumers to buy or rent the product.

The removal from sale or rent of Out Video’s titles will do nothing to reduce their availability. All the “offending” titles are available from online stores outside the country. Australians can order them online and watch them at home, avoiding the scrutiny of the censors.

Furthermore, internet-aided piracy is now extremely common. By denying consumers legal access to small-run films, mandatory classification provides additional incentives for consumers to download illegal copies.

The sale of unclassified material is hardly uncommon. If government bureaucrats want to clamp down on unclassified videos, they should take a walk down Victoria Street or Sydney Road. Both are hives of foreign-language video stores that stock unclassified foreign-language films. In all likelihood the Government wouldn’t dare act in these cases: the electoral backlash would be considerable.

It is unlikely that homophobia played a part in the Government’s decision to enforce the law: it acted because it received a complaint. But if homophobia was the cause of that complaint, it would merely demonstrate how the classification laws can be manipulated.

Current film classification laws undermine access to films for different sections of the community. And businesses that are trying to meet a diverse market demand for unique niche content should not be punished for doing so.

The Slippery Slope Towards Internet Censorship Continues

The Australian Government continued down the slippery slope towards internet censorship yesterday by introducing a bill to give the Australian Federal Police the power to nominate terrorism or crime related websites for filtering.

In The Australian Greens Senator Kerry Nettle expressed concerns that the Police Commissioner might use these new powers to call for Greenpeace’s website to be filtered – which really should raise more questions about the activities of Greenpeace than the value of the legislation.

Nevertheless, there is slightly less to this bill than it seems at first glance. The internet industry code currently governing online content already provides for filtering of pornographic and offensive content. But this filtering is voluntary, not mandatory.

At the moment, internet service providers who want to be designated “family friendly” by the Internet Industry Association have to offer their customers one of a range of approved PC or server side commercial filters. And these filters are periodically updated according to an Australian Communications and Media Authority black list. Yesterday’s bill would merely allow the AFP to add terrorism or crime related sites to that black list. But why would aspiring terrorists and criminals willingly install a family friendly filter onto their PC?

A lot rides on how the Internet Industry Association rewrites its codes of practise in the light of the government’s NetAlert scheme. Under NetAlert, all internet service providers will be compelled to offer consumers the choice between an unfiltered internet connection or a server-side filtered one.

Again, terrorists are unlikely to choose a filtered internet connection. The government’s new legislation only really makes sense if the unfiltered product is not going to be truly ‘unfiltered’. That the internet content bill was introduced quietly yesterday morning does not inspire confidence that the government plans to leave our internet connections alone. And it’s worth remembering that the Labor Party has for a long time promised mandatory server side filters if they win government.

Quite aside from the internet censorship issue, this bill highlights a disturbing regulatory trend – governments delegating the policing of the internet to the communications industry. Many of the measures canvassed by the inquiry into social networking sites would do just that. Even outside the high-technology sector, counterterrorism and anti money laundering regulation in the financial sector compels firms to police their own customers.

Particularly in the communications sector, these sorts of regulatory burdens can only add to costs for consumers.

Better To Be Alert Than NetAlarmed

The internet will kill your children, or something.

At least, that is the message of the Federal Government ads plastered on the side of every second tram trundling down Swanston Street.

The Government’s approach to internet safety has all the hyperbole and sensationalism of tabloid current affairs programs. This is not surprising. Scare campaigns about the dangers of chatting or stumbling upon nudity usually have little to do with children, and all to do with raising fear in parents. Parents vote.

NetAlert, the initiative that provides those free internet filters that were broken within 30 minutes by a year 10 student, will do little to stop children finding pornography online if they want to. And the mandatory internet filtering that the Government has announced will be expensive and mostly unworkable.

In a further step, last Thursday the Government announced an investigation into sex offenders and pedophiles on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. But the policy options raised by the Government — such as segregating adults and children online, mandatory age verification, or requiring parental approval before signing up to sites — will be as ineffective as NetAlert. Bureaucratic obstacles are no defence against individuals determined to cause harm.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Government’s internet policies are not much more than cynical vote-gathering. In the absence of any other ideas for the upcoming election, the Federal Government is asking voters to think of the children.

But what do the children themselves think about internet safety? The Department of Communications kicked an own goal last week when it released a study of the attitudes of parents and kids. Parents were concerned that the internet exposed children to pornography and was full of strangers and chat rooms. Children were more worried about pop-up ads, viruses and substandard internet speeds. Not surprisingly, few were concerned about pornography. Some expressed concerns about interacting with dangerous strangers.

The study did not provide any support for one of the bulwarks of the Government’s policy — the mandatory internet filter. It revealed instead that internet literacy was a more effective protection against any potential danger online.

Regulating MySpace and filtering the internet provide no substitute for education. Governments can have a role to play in educating about online safety; they set the school curriculum and most children attend public schools. The second way governments can approach child safety is through police work. After all, parents should be outraged not that pedophiles could be on MySpace, but that there are pedophiles at large.

Like any matters to do with children, parents have to take the bulk of the responsibility. The most effective approach to internet safety and obscenity is monitoring online activity. The best protection for children is the setting of boundaries.

Too much of the Federal Government’s internet policy is a distraction from these far more effective approaches.

A few months ago, many commentators assumed that the Federal Government had a rabbit to pull out of the hat before this election. Free internet filters and giving Kieran Perkins the title of “Parent Ambassador” are unfortunately more likely to make the Government look like bunnies.

Cracking Coonan’s Filter And Other Tech Wrecks

For the second time in recent months, Communications Minister Helen Coonan has found herself in the awkward position of trying to defend the merits of specific technologies.

Coonan argued that the government had anticipated that the porn filter announced by the Prime Minister last week would be cracked, eventually but must have been shocked by how quickly it was. On Friday, a year ten student found a workaround in thirty minutes, and defeated the subsequent update in forty more. Nevertheless, the government stands by the software it chose.

Similarly, when the Minister announced that the Optus-Elders consortium had won nearly a billion dollars to provide regional broadband, she was forced to defend the WiMAX technology against a barrage of criticism.

WiMAX is a high-quality technology but its reputation has suffered from some outrageous claims by its proponents. Early WiMAX advocates breathlessly claimed ranges of up to 70 kilometres. The government claims a range of 25 kilometres – even this is hopelessly optimistic.

Real life experience suggests that the technology has a much more modest range of 5-10 kilometres, in good conditions. And only on spectrum that the Optus-Elders network doesn’t currently have access to.

This new role – the government as tech expert – is becoming more and more prominent. Consumers are now quick to learn whether specific technologies or services meet the government’s seal of approval.

For instance, Telstra’s Next G service is, apparently, not satisfactory – Helen Coonan has received “hundreds of complaints”.

The Minister has also determined that a recent Telstra upgrade of its Hybrid Fibre Coaxial cable network is better than fibre-to-the-node technology, which will be news for those in the industry who have spent the last two years debating the appropriate regulatory framework to encourage firms to invest in fiberoptic broadband network.

Sometimes these statements are mere rhetoric flourishes, indicative only of a government struggling to navigate the complex interactions between politics and high-technology. But many in the industry are frustrated with the Communications Minister’s self-appointed role as technology propagandist and critic.

The government, when pressed, insists that it remains strictly “technology neutral” when it writes public policy. Unfortunately, the reality is much different.

In the course of the long-running dispute with Telstra, the government has largely abandoned allowing the market to decide the most suitable technologies. Instead, it has readopted the characteristic winner picking strategies which have long discredited national industry policies.

Monitoring Porn: Not Government’s Responsibility

Prime Minister John Howard used last night’s webcast to Christian groups across the country to announce a $190 million “crackdown” on pornography, terrorists and child sex predators online.

When politicians equate pornography with terrorism and child abuse, you know they aren’t approaching the matter soberly. The “think of the children” mindset is a powerful drug.

Pornography is consensual and legal. Terrorism and child abuse are reprehensible violent crimes. From a public policy perspective they require two distinct approaches.

Terrorism and child abuse require strong police action – trying to compel internet chat room to “detect” child predators is a remarkably feeble defence against child abuse. Chat room operators lack the expertise and resources to detect possible future illegal activity. It is, after all, the role of government to protect people from harm, not the role of private companies.

Anti-terrorism should also be the focus of law enforcement, not communications regulators and ISPs.

The government has been telegraphing this announcement for some time.

After hearing that a school child had been suspended for downloading pornography onto his 3G phone, Communications Minister Helen Coonan last year condemned the technology as “pipelines for perversion”. Unsurprisingly, yesterday’s Telstra results show a dramatic increase in 3G phone sales.

But until today, the Liberal Party had been much more sensible about online pornography than the Labor Party. In the 2004 election, the relatively measured approach adopted by the Coalition contrasted well with Mark Latham’s ambitious and misguided SafetyOnline filtering program.

Now ISPs are going to be compelled to offer consumers a “family friendly” broadband package, which will filter out sites that do not meet the approval of the Australian Communications and Media Authority. Such ISP-level filtering will be powerless against pornography distribution over peer-to-peer networks, chat sites or even email. Teenagers eager to get their hands on some porn will not be at all deterred.

For this reason, parents have to bear the primary responsibility for monitoring their children’s online activity. They already have a remarkable array of tools to do so. Many internet service providers already offer their customers free or subsidised content filters as part of their broadband package.

Terrorism and child abuse are the responsibility of governments, but monitoring the exposure of children to pornography should be the responsibility of parents and guardians.

It appears that online content regulation is another example of the general jettisoning of good public policy that has characterised the government’s last twelve months.

Big Brother vs. Big Brother: How politicians failed to understand reality television and in their confusion instead decided to regulate the internet

With Hugh Tobin

If the people who watch Big Brother are so stupid, why do we allow them to vote? After all, the cultural criticism of reality television is, implicitly, a criticism of its audience.

The political condemnation which has greeted a series of reality television controversies could easily backfire. The series is simple entertainment, but it is entertainment designed to reflect the social lives and concerns of its audience. There is more to Big Brother than voyeurism.

Nevertheless, in June this year, the cultural pessimists who have made sport of condemning the reality television genre were provided with yet another target for their concentrated hysteria. A new Dutch reality television programme, The Big Donor Show, starred a terminally ill woman with a kidney to donate. Three potential donor recipients were to compete for the life-saving organ. (The programme’s logo tastefully featured a drawing of a kidney in place of the final ‘o’ of ‘donor’.)

Of course, it was a stunt, designed to highlight the shortage of organ donors in the Netherlands and, indeed, around the world. The conservative politicians who had been quick to condemn the programme and call for its censorship awkwardly tried to back away.

The show may have been designed to attract attention to the shortage of organ donors, but the politicians who instinctively shot from the hip illustrated just how highly politicised reality television has become. Reality television attracts vehement criticism—criticism about its supposed emphasis on sex, its voyeurism, its artlessness, and its seeming appeal to the lowest common denominator.

On the surface, many of these objections seem unfounded. Artless voyeurism and sexual innuendo have not merely been a prominent feature of the history of television, but probably a big source of the medium’s popularity. Reality television, then, is simply another genre of entertainment, and should be judged by the same standards as ‘traditional’ genres such as sport or drama. Putting aside the intellectual snobbery adopted by culturally conservative politicians, there’s nothing harmful about a bit of trash TV.

The success of the Dutch kidney donor stunt was only made possible by exploiting the instant notoriety with which reality television has become synonymous. And just as in the Netherlands, over-zealous Australian politicians have rushed to condemn the tone and content of the genre. But the political response in Australia has gone much further than simple statements to the press. The knee-jerk reaction to a series of reality television scandals has led to a major regulatory expansion for online content and delivery.

The controversy surrounding Big Brother in mid-2006 has inspired the federal government to increase the powers of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to police mobile phone and online content. A hastily written piece of legislation now urges the regulator to develop industry standards for the entire Australian internet community, as well as enforce the removal of ‘objectionable’ material here and overseas.

Vague borders

It’s no surprise that Big Donor would originate in the Netherlands. Endemol, the production company which produced the stunt, was one of the major companies responsible for the modern wave of reality television. It produced the first series of Big Brother which aired in 1999 on Dutch commercial television.

The first of the Survivor franchise was aired in Sweden in 1997 as Expedition: Robinson, and 19 Entertainment’s Idol format began in 2001 with its UK series, Pop Idol. These have all been franchised internationally: there are now 95 different winners of the Idol series around the world, and more than 160 winners of Big Brother.

But reality television, a loose genre which presents largely unscripted non-actors in various contrived situations, has a long history. 1948 — the same year in which George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four — also saw the first television broadcast of Candid Camera, the long-running and influential concealed camera show which pioneered the genre.

The borders of reality television are unclear. The genre borders upon documentary filmmaking — programmes such as the US’s COPS and Australia’s Border Security, or ‘celebreality’ shows, such as The Osbournes and Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, document the daily lives of non-actors. The Seven Up! Series — the latest episode of which was reviewed in the December 2006 edition of the IPA Review — also shares some similarities with this strand of the genre.

What constitutes ‘reality’ television is often a matter of degree — many of the staples of the genre have close affinities with more traditional programme formats. Like a game show, the participants in Big Brother compete against each other for a prize, as do contestants in the Idol and Survivor formats. Talk shows such as the Jerry Springer Show have also sometimes been classified as part of the genre when they actively try to foment on-air drama between participants.

Much reality television blurs into fiction. The question of just how ‘real’ reality television is is made particularly problematic by shows such as Laguna Beach, which purports to follow a group of wealthy teenagers living in Orange County, California. Laguna Beach features a not-insignificant amount of scripting and ‘production manipulation’.

Scandal and controversy have accompanied reality television since its early days — reality television has been a more powerful conduit for debate about social and cultural issues than any number of high-minded, preachy Hollywood films. In the 1973 US series An American Family, which centred around a family experiencing a divorce, the eldest child’s homosexuality was the lightning rod for controversy.

In 1992’s Sylvania Waters, a series which filmed an Australian family, the perceived and real alcoholism, racism, and materialism of the Laurie Donaher/Noeline Baker de facto family drew much criticism. The Sun headlined its story on the series when it debuted in the UK: ‘Meet Noeline. By Tonight You’ll Hate Her Too’.

The most controversial programmes, however, have been those which have placed participants in special living environments. MTV’s The Real World has, since 1992, placed participants together in an urban house and given them jobs and group activities. Tensions and arguments over race and sexual orientations have been a recurring theme throughout the series.

Politics and Big Brother

Unsurprisingly, the Big Brother franchise has a tradition of controversy. Last year’s accusations of racism in the UK Celebrity Big Brother gained the British series world-wide attention. Politicians who have been so eager for the limelight that they have volunteered as participants have come under heavy public fire. The Scottish MP George Galloway thought that the best way to capitalise on his notoriety after being accused of Iraqi Oil-for-Food corruption was to appear on the 2006 edition of Celebrity Big Brother. The minority whip of the Mexican Green Party also participated in a 2004 Mexican Big Brother, to much political criticism.

The Australian Big Brother may not have featured any politicians as housemates yet, but the franchise has been readily embraced as a political totem. Beginning in 2001, early Australian seasons of Big Brother were aired with relatively little controversy. 2003 saw a small incident as one housemate identified a minor in an ongoing court trial — the producers frantically shut down the live Internet feeds and official Website discussion boards. A 2004 contestant staged a silent protest upon his eviction from the house, taping his mouth shut and holding up a banner reading ‘Free th refugees’ (sic), to the consternation of producers who had planned the usual extensive post-eviction interview.

The Dutch production company which developed the Big Brother format originally conceived as few as six contestants locked up in a house for a year. The format was partly inspired by the early Webcam movement, a late 1990s’ trend where exhibitionists document a usually unedited video stream of their lives onto the Internet, including sexual encounters.

And it is this lineage of total surveillance and exhibitionism that has provided the source of the major controversy. The 2005 series’ emphasis on the sex appeal of the housemates, in particular the weekly 9.40pm ‘Uncut’ programme which presented material not appropriate for the 7pm ‘Daily Show’, was a focal point of political condemnation. ‘Uncut’ featured, for the most part, conversations about the sex lives of the housemates, shower scene footage, and general playing around.

Following complaints from the Australian Family Association, Liberal MP Trish Draper condemned the programme as pornographic, arguing that the housemates have ‘an aspiration to be porn stars’. Big Brother participants are certainly exhibitionists, but it would undoubtedly be easier to get work on a porn film than become a housemate.

In 2005, ‘Uncut’ was the problem. Once the programme had attracted the attention of the Communications Minister, Helen Coonan, media regulators determined that the material chosen for broadcast was in breach of the free-to-air code of conduct. For the next year’s season the programme was retitled ‘Adults Only’ and the sexual content watered down. (Nevertheless, by June 2006, Channel Ten had succumbed to political pressure from government backbenchers and pulled the show; even though it was, as everybody acknowledged, firmly within the bounds of broadcasting regulations and the television industry’s code of conduct.)

But for Big Brother 2006, the biggest controversy wasn’t what was broadcast on free-to-air television. It was the Internet-only, subscription-only live feed which recorded the alleged sexual harassment by two contestants of a third female participant.

Steve Fielding of Family First led the critical charge of criticism at the show: ‘This show legitimises behaviour that is not acceptable anywhere in our community and this latest incident is disgusting and degrading and, quite frankly, this is not a community standard that’s acceptable … Family First is calling for Big Brother to be pulled’.

The Prime Minister also called Big Brother a ‘stupid program’, and the Communications Minister said that it was ‘disturbing and offensive’. Predictably, the ACMA was once again pulled back into the fray.

Whether the ACMA had jurisdiction over the online material was, however, uncertain. The incident was not broadcast on television. As the ACMA noted in its report, the footage wasn’t even stored on the Big Brother website — the site did not provide an archive of the feed. But enterprising subscribers had recorded it themselves, and the incident was soon viewable on video-sharing sites such as YouTube.

The ACMA’s report concluded that there was little the regulator could do about what was provided online. For the government this was an insufficiently dramatic political response to the August 2006 incident.

So now, in 2007, we have legislation which gives the ACMA that authority. The Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Bill, which passed through parliament in late June, gives the regulator authority over ‘ephemeral’ content services such as Internet live feeds, as well as the power to regulate ‘convergent’ devices, such as mobile phones offering video or other content. But the importance of the new legislation is not limited to an expansion of the ACMA’s jurisdiction. The law places the regulator firmly at the centre of ascertaining the responsibility for content created and delivered on the internet.

The creation of content by Internet users, rather than professional content producers, has been one of the primary innovations in entertainment technology over the last decade. Sites such as YouTube provide a neutral distribution system for users to upload and broadcast that content. But the introduction of this legislation requires the site to police the material it hosts, rather than placing the responsibility with the producer of the material. As Microsoft has noted, this surpasses the high regulatory bar set by the European Union—an unfavourable comparison.

The high pace of innovation has blurred the distinction between forms of content and delivery—indeed, this is a good working definition of ‘convergence’. In an effort to translate the complex technological and cultural changes of the content industry, the legislation confuses and over-regulates.

For example, there are 22 exemptions to what is considered, for the purposes of the legislation, as a ‘content service’. Entrepreneurs eager to found their own YouTube killer in Australia will struggle to navigate the convoluted legal framework and liability issues. They will be doubly frustrated if they had originally been seduced by the federal government’s public desire to encourage a local content industry.

Between the audience and the activists

As has regularly been pointed out both by critics and contestants, ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘Uncut’/‘Adults Only’ programmes of Big Brother are not strictly ‘real’. Programme producers can cut and edit what is finally broadcast to direct or create narratives, play up potentially dramatic situations and even manipulate audience perceptions of individual housemates. But they have very little capacity to manipulate the live Internet feed.

What is shown live from the house is as close to ‘reality’ as audiences are likely to get from the artificial environment of Big Brother. If the programme’s original conceit was to broadcast the mundane lives of a group of people in an isolated house, then live streaming is the ultimate manifestation of that idea.

When politicians criticise or disparage the contestants on Big Brother, they implicitly criticise the (voting) audience.

In the UK, the programme’s audience is 58 per cent female, and 49 per cent are aged between 16 and 34. The Australian audience has a similar composition. The participants on most of the standard Big Brother series are deliberately chosen to replicate the likely audience.

This same demographic now spends more time online (38 per cent) than with any other entertainment medium. Again, the activity online provides an interesting parallel with the Big Brother format. This is the same generation that is likely to have a public profile on MySpace or Facebook, to record their daily activities publicly on services such as Twitter, to run a blog, to produce YouTube commentaries, or in some other way to participate in online discussions and forums.

Big Brother may be exhibitionism on the scale of free-to-air television, but the audience also practices their own smaller-scale exhibitionism online.

Politicians eager to court this key demographic should be wary of such instant point-scoring. The reactionary attitude of the political class to the genre is, particularly for young viewers, indicative of a failure to understand youth culture.

One recent paper in the International Journal of Cultural Studies has found that UK Big Brother viewers were, when assessing a politician, most likely to give their support to someone who they saw as an ‘ordinary’ person. The programme, this finding implies, is popular because the audience can relate to the housemates; and politics is unpopular because the participants are harder to relate to.

How individuals acted in the artificial environment of the Big Brother house was seen as a reliable guide to their personality and ability—a view that contrasts poorly with finely stage-managed political personas. The ‘Uncut’/‘Adults Only’ programme was both unfiltered titillation and a candid display of key aspects of the housemate’s personalities.

Endemol has itself encouraged the comparison between the programme and politics. The company’s UK division sponsored a 2003 study which contrasted what it saw as the typical Big Brother viewer — typically female, under 40, and largely uninterested in politics — with ‘Political Junkies’—male, 50-plus, professionals, who regularly discussed politics in social settings. Endemol’s UK chairman wrote in the study that the British government needed to replicate the most appealing aspects of Big Brother and ‘broaden its accountability, allowing the electorate more control via interactivity and thus earning more respect from the new generation of voters’.

Politicians should probably not apply to be housemates. George Galloway was, after all, voted out of the house early into the season. But the remarkably confused interpretation of the implications and importance of reality television and the internet has led Australian politicians to demonstrate just how little they understand this key demographic.

When the frills of Big Brother — the prize money, the weekly voting, the Friday-night games — are stripped away, the programme does nothing more than stick 14 young people in a house and watches what they do. They may be more attractive and extroverted than the norm, but they represent a cross-section of the social, political and economic make-up of their generation.

Politicians would do better to watch the show than to breathlessly condemn it.