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Written by Beatrix | Saturday, April 11th, 2009
The (ACMA) Australian Communications and Media Authority issued a blacklist in an aim to censor various “indecent” websites, including internet poker sites. This information was revealed last month through a leak and some anonymous sources. Following an uproar from the Australian community, communications Minister Stephen Conroy was forced to admit to errors made inside his policy of controversial internet censorship.
Numerous online poker sites such as PokerStars, Full Tilt Poker and other sites with hyperlinks to banned sites were among the minimum of 2,000 blacklisted sites. Australia’s Internet service providers (ISPs) were scheduled to secretly block these websites but the list was leaked by wikileaks.com. Wikileaks is a leading online opponent of the government censorship and also supporting freedom of data constituted by anonymous submissions.
The ABC program “Q&A” showing on March 26 was Senator Conroy’s first major TV appearance discussing the government’s internet censorship future plans. There was a substantial response from media viewers with more than 2,000 people sending web and video questions about the proposals of the government’s censorship.
The show’s host, Tony Jones, stated “We’ve never seen anything like the avalanche Stephen Conroy has generated”.
Conroy’s broadcast admissions stirred the situation even further, leaving considerable doubt regarding the government’s capacity of filtering the internet without blocking legitimate websites on purpose. He also admitted that the images taken by artist/photographer Bill Henson were included to the prohibited websites list by mistake. It put the spotlight on the “Russian Mob” for adding a dentist’s site to the list, stating that the Mob hacked into the dentist’s site. After changing hosting providers and cleaning up their websites several years ago, numerous other sites still appeared on the blacklist.
Conroy said, “The classification board looked at (Bill Henson’s) website and actually said it’s PG,” “A technical error inside ACMA I’m advised included it, but it was actually cleared by the Classification Board, so it shouldn’t be on the list.” “I’ve asked ACMA in the last few hours to go through their entire list again to see if there are any other examples of this.”
The Australian community doesn’t have access to the blacklist and are unaware of the criteria used in this banning process. As a result, Conroy’s comments have raised concerns amongst the Australians about freedom of speech.
Such a ban on online poker sites will have a vast effect in Australia, a country where the industry has been moving forward in spite of the recent limitations enforced by ACMA. According to the Internet Gambling Act 2001, it is illegal to provide an interactive gambling service to those customers physically living in Australia. It is only in the past months that ACMA has shown more determination to restrict such unlawful material.
World-wide poker tournaments such as the multi-million dollar Aussie Millions, the Asia Pacific Poker Tour, Asian Poker Tour and the Australia-New Zealand Poker Tour are all hosted in Australia.
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