Senate Select Committee on Information Technologies: Inquiry into Self-Regulation and the Information and Communications Industry

Submission from Robin Whittle 21 January 1998

Public version - the same what was sent to the Committee, but with a URL deleted on page 45.  Originally a Word document - converted to HTML 15 May, with the help of Brenda Aynsley.

Robin Whittle - First Principles Consulting

11 Miller St Heidelberg Heights Vic 3081 Ph 03 9459 2889 Fax 03 9458 1736

Email rw@firstpr.com.au World Wide Web: http://www.firstpr.com.au
 

Summary

While self-regulation may have certain advantages, in those industries where the participants cannot easily be identified and/or in which there is widespread disrespect for the public, the costs, complications and ineffectiveness of self-regulatory regimes are an unjustifiable burden on society. This self-regulatory trend is often part of a larger fashion for government to shirk its regulatory responsibilities. In other cases, self-regulation is proposed where no regulation is needed at all - for instance Internet content regulation - saving the government from taking responsibility for the unpopular and unjustifiable restrictions it seeks to impose on the public.

This submission proposes criteria for determining whether formal regulation is required - and if it is required, for determining whether it should be accomplished directly by government, by an industry developed self-regulatory approach, or by an industry based "forced-self-regulatory" approach developed to meet government priorities, on threat of legislative regulation. Case-studies are presented covering areas in need of better regulation, or which are proposed to be regulated by one means or another and which should not be.

There are many areas in which government in recent years has failed to protect the public from threats which are amenable to systematic government regulation, and which individuals cannot defend themselves against. Sometimes this is manifested by an ineffective self-regulatory approach. In other cases it is manifested by the problem falling between the cracks and never being officially recognised. The common themes seem to be:

1. Governments instinctively regulating communications which seem to challenge its narrow sense of "community values".


2. Governments seeing all business activity as good - and adopting a simplistic policy of minimal regulation in order to remove barriers to business growth.


3. As an extension of this, and under the rubric of reducing expenditure, cutting the budgets of regulatory agencies and departments whose work is policy research and development.


4. Governments being fundamentally uninterested in the privacy of individuals.

Contents

1 - Introduction 3

2 - When the public needs to be protected, what forms of regulation are there? 5

Market forces and self-defence - ie. no formal regulation 5

Industry informal regulation - eg. ISPs refusing to support disruptive users 6

Industry formal self-regulation without government involvement 7

Industry self-regulation - forced by the government 7

Regulation by government 8

3 - Government's contract with the people  9

4 - Criteria for deciding whether there needs to be government/industry-based regulation  11

5 - Strengths and weaknesses of government regulation, industry self-regulation and forced-self-regulation  21

6 - Criteria for deciding between legislation and government backed "self-regulation"  29

7 - Governments shirking their responsibilities to regulate  31

8 - Governments regulating inappropriately  34

9 - Case studies  Summary  35

Federal privacy regulation for companies 37

Privacy in the mass media 37

Internet content regulation: Illegal material - ie. child-pornography 40

Internet content regulation: Protecting community standards 42

Internet communications are completely different from mass-media technologies 42

Publishing 45

Community Standards - and the historical perspective 45

Internet content regulation: Protecting children 49

Internet content regulation: Contempt of court 50

Internet content regulation: Defamation and disclosure of private material 52

Internet content regulation: Copyright 53

ISPs and the TIO 53

ISPs and Interception 54

Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace 55

Calling Number Display 57

Outbound telemarketing 58

SPAM email 63

Ex-directory (Silent Line) numbers 63

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1 - Introduction

This submission is intended to provide the Committee with an overview of many of the areas in the communication and information technologies where regulation is needed, and a few where it is not needed but is proposed or enforced anyway. The question of the effectiveness and appropriateness of "self-regulatory" approaches needs to be viewed as part of the larger question of why government has in recent years failed to protect the public in many fields.

Since 1992 I have been involved in many debates about regulation, especially those concerning privacy and freedom of communications. All of this work has been unpaid. Most of it has been as in independent advocate, working with other individuals and loosely with the Australian Privacy Foundation and Electronic Frontiers of Australia. For three years I was a Council member of Consumers Telecommunications Network. There's more information on my telecommunications experience at:

http://www.firstpr.com.au/telco/

While this work has generally been interesting, it has been emotionally and financially draining. Sometimes my work made an important difference - or I thought it did. I have generally been optimistic about the ability of consumers advocates to work with regulators and industry. In most cases I have got on very well with the people concerned and I believe my work contributed to the outcomes of various reports.

Now, with the worst-case outcome on telemarketing, with the government's complete betrayal of the public with Calling Number Display, with no-one taking an interest in Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace, and with the government still proposing to go ahead with Internet censorship, I have to face the fact that most of my efforts have been a complete waste of time. All these failures to protect the public are ultimately the government's failures.

I have a detailed understanding of how a large network of people in companies, regulators, government departments and in the government collectively behave in ways contrary to common sense and the public interest. Despite the many bright, well informed, astute people in consumer advocacy, regulatory agencies, government departments, in parliament and in corporations, somehow, collectively, the end result is often that the public's real interests are over-ridden by short-sighted commercial pressures. Important factors include short-term thinking, greed, group-think, and a strange set of thrills which arise from cutting budgets, forcing regulations in some areas, and deliberately under-regulating in others. There's no central source of malice in this - but it is the government's responsibility to correct the problems and optimise the outcome for the public.

On any one of these issues there was a lot more work to do. The material on my web sites represents a fraction of my work over the past six years.

It is an indictment of the process of government that work such as this has to be done by unpaid volunteers such as myself. In some fields, such as Calling Number Display, government supported workers (from the Privacy Commissioner's Office) were on the case as well. In many other fields, there was no-one. The few paid consumer advocates in this field are overwhelmed with work. So too are the staff at the Privacy Commissioner's office, especially after recent budget cuts of 43%.

I would much prefer to be continuing my work in electronics, music and telecommunications writing (for Australian Communications magazine) and consulting - rather than writing another submission.

Communication and information industries are rapidly changing and represent a challenge for any government in deciding whether to regulate or not, and if so, how to do so most effectively. However there are many fields - such as Calling Number Display, Telemarketing and Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace - where the government's failure to regulate cannot be explained by complexity or rapid change. In these fields the technology is stable and the issues are straightforward.

Things could be worse in Australia. With a little more wisdom and effort, they could also be very much better. This submission is intended to lead to current and future governments taking a more sophisticated, energetic, serious approach to privacy and telecommunications regulation.

I like to think that all Committee members make regular use of the Internet, including email and the World Wide Web. Quite apart from the opportunities these provide for personal communication and research - and the ability they provide for parliamentarians to engage with the public without the constraints of the mass media - Internet experience and exploration is essential for any parliamentarian making decisions concerning communications and information. While I appreciate that parliamentarians need to be generalists, and don't seek personal experience of some fields they make decisions about (euthanasia, drug abuse . . . ), email and the World Wide Web are perfectly safe, fascinating, educational and generally enjoyable forms of communication.

This has been written rather quickly, with little time for review - please excuse any rough spots.

There are some areas I would have liked to comment on, but have not had time: Privacy aspects of itemised phone bills; and a more generalised approach to regulating against people who systematically make unacceptable communications.

This may be the last significant piece of consumer advocacy I do. Its unsustainable for a person who intends to have a family to spend so much time working to improve the regulatory process - especially when previous efforts have been largely a waste of time because the government was so disinterested in the real needs of the public.
 

Yours sincerely
 
 
 
Robin Whittle

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2 - When the public needs to be protected, what forms of regulation are there?

Market forces and self-defence - ie. no formal regulation

There is no formal regulation against milk-bars charging a hundred dollars for an ice-cream. It is assumed that consumers will become suitably informed of the costs and benefits before they actually hand over the funds.

Nor are there any regulations regarding what one person can say to another in private conversation - with a few notable exceptions such as making threats of death or injury.

Similar to private conversation, there are no regulations regarding what people may communicate to each other, in private, via telephone, via letters, or - so far - via email.

There are no regulations on how sugary or fatty foods can be - consumers are assumed to be sufficiently knowledgable about tooth decay, obesity and pimples. However, the government may quite rightly decide that taxpayer's money is well spent on educational programs, and that all food and personal care products should have all their ingredients listed.

There are no regulations saying that children must be physically barred from dangerous situations such as open fires, kettles and saucepans on stoves, or traffic in the street. It is assumed that the responsible adult has enough common sense and concern to control the children so as to assure their safety.

Nor are there any regulations preventing children in their homes viewing adult nudity, love-making, erotic/pornographic (who is to decide the difference?) printed or video material - or for that matter seeing a chook's head chopped off.

Common features of all these situations are:
 

1. There is some kind of threat to unsuspecting members of the public. (Someone may overcharge them or insult them. They may be subject to physical danger. They may see something that upsets them, or perhaps causes lasting confusion or distress.)


2. Regulations could be made, in one way or another, prohibiting the actions which caused the threat.


3. Such regulations are not made, for a variety of reasons including:


1. The person is able to defend themselves quite adequately - for instance the $100 ice-cream - or perhaps returning the insult in kind.


2. Regulations would be impractical to enforce.


3. Regulations would involve the state in unreasonable restrictions on individual's lives.
 

The first point is probably the most important - if people can adequately protect themselves, then there is no justification for the costs and complications of government regulation.

Later, I will show that the case of SPAM (Shit Parading As Meat) unsolicited email fits this pattern, and that outbound telemarketing does not.
 

Industry informal regulation - eg. ISPs refusing to support disruptive users

I don't think this principle of requiring "good behaviour" of Internet users is written down formally anywhere. The respectful culture which has developed over fifteen years or so may be breaking down a little now, with the influx of commercially motivated and insensitive, uneducated users. The result of this requirement not to disrupt others is that those very few users who systematically engage in conduct which is unacceptable to others - for instance those who email SPAM to millions of people - find that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) refuse to connect them to the Internet. Unfortunately this is not sufficient to stop them, since they may be able to connect under false pretences, or via an unwary ISP. However it is an example of an industry - in this case ISPs who provide Internet connectivity - working informally to protect the public.

This involves devolved responsibility. The ISP is allowed to connect to other ISPs (and therefore to the Internet) on the basis that it does not support users or activities which disrupt others. ISPs which continue to allow SPAMmers to operate from within their domains are finding that some ISPs are blocking all traffic from those ISPs. This is a a last-ditch resort, after complaints to the errant ISP fail to cause it to disconnect the SPAMmer. Such blockage of traffic from an ISP, which affects all their customers, is something an errant ISP cannot tolerate for long - and so it is a reasonably effective way of ISPs working together to ensure that no-one connects users whose activities are grossly disruptive.

There are other measures for protecting against SPAM. Some take place at the user's computer, and so belong in the category above. Others take place at the ISP - for instance not forwarding to users any email which comes from known SPAMmers. This is the industry acting defensively to protect its customers.

These arrangements arise because of need, because they are technically possible and because industry participants are prepared to organise on a relatively informal basis to protect themselves and their customers. There is no government involvement - nor "indirect" pressure from governments, such as "If the industry does not control SPAM, we will legislate or force you into a 'self-regulatory' regime.".

Recently the Internet Engineering Task Force has been developing a more formal approach to the SPAM problem.

http://www.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-run-spew-02.txt

Industry formal self-regulation without government involvement

The former kind typically involves a proportion of players in an industry getting organised to set standards of conduct. This may be motivated by genuine concern for consumers, and/or by a desire to make life more difficult for rat-bag and fly-by-night operators who compete with the more responsible businesses.

Such schemes may not need government involvement of ACCC sanction - provided they have no anti-competitive aspects. In an effort to isolate the cowboy operators, a scheme may require its members to refuse to deal with the cowboys - but that would be anti-competitive and would only be lawful with the blessing of the ACCC, who would evaluate the scheme to (ideally) ensure that the benefits to consumers outweigh the anti-competitive provisions.

Many industries have formal schemes, with no anti-competitive aspects - typically to formally set out how a business should treat its customers, and to create an organisation, administration and easily identifiable logo for the members of the scheme. I think this typically involves a lot of work by a relatively few committed individuals at considerable cost to themselves or their businesses.

Very often these schemes are good for consumers. However when the "industry" is primarily based on exploitative practices (eg. outbound telemarketing) the "code of conduct" - such as that created by the Australian Direct Marketing Association - can be largely window-dressing to provide a veneer of respectability whilst allowing the exploitative practices to continue. A genuinely protective code-of-conduct would not be widely adopted by an industry which thrives on exploitative practices.
 
 

Industry self-regulation - forced by the government

However, when the government's intention is at odds with that of the public - for instance in Internet content regulation - then the results can be a real mess. Perhaps some industry segments seek a compromise with the government's position - and so give the government's position greater credibility than it deserves.

Forced "Self-regulatory" schemes, like genuinely self-regulatory schemes, involve compliance and enforcement mechanisms administered by an industry body. This can have advantages to the equivalent government run regulatory scheme and it can have disadvantages - such as complexity, lack of "teeth" and perceived lack of independence.
 

Regulation by government

Sometimes particular organisations are empowered by governments to administer laws and to create their own regulations - for instance the RSPCA, or the board which determines whether to deregister medical practitioners.

Sometimes there are very clear laws - for instance regarding malicious phone calls (Federal Crimes Act 85ZE) - but due to the evidentiary difficulties (caused by a lack of Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace) and the under-resourcing of the Federal Police, charges and convictions under this criminal law are rare. Consequently the law is not well known and does little to protect the public.

There are many government regulatory approaches. While some are ineffective, they generally true have more teeth, and are better known and better enforced than self-regulatory or forced "self-regulatory" schemes.

Weaknesses can be caused by poorly resourced regulators, or by general disrespect for the law itself. For instance there are criminal provisions for the export of cryptographic software from Australia, as there in the USA - but these laws are now completely anachronistic. They only restrict those companies who must comply with the letter of the law - and have no effect on the national security priorities of trying to keep strong cryptography out of reach of Australia's military enemies.

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3 - Government's contract with the people

1 - Governments are a costly inconvenience, but are necessary to provide a number of services which cannot be provided by any other means.

2 - We (the people) finance and support the government so that it can perform certain functions which cannot be left to individuals or to corporations, for instance:

• Establishing a national currency.
• Defence.
• Environmental protection.
• Education.
• Preventative health.
• Support for people with disabilities, health problems and those who are unemployed.
• Defining (via the Parliament) a body of criminal and civil law, and the empowering of regulators, the Police, the courts and the corrections system to enforce those laws - for purposes including:


1. Protection of individuals from the unpleasant, dangerous or costly actions of others - particularly in circumstances where systematic, country-wide protective schemes are more effective than personal defences.


2. Similarly, protection of individuals from their own actions. (A much more problematic field!)


3. To enhance national unity and "social standards" - to protect a diffuse notion of collective benefit from the actions of those who would challenge it. (An extremely problematic and contentious field!)

Point 'a' above is a key element in the contract which government has with the people who appoint it:

a - Protection of individuals from the unpleasant, dangerous or costly actions of others - particularly in circumstances where systematic, country-wide protective schemes are more effective than personal defences.

1. Which the government can effectively protect us from, and


2. where the government action will not restrict individual's freedoms (except of those individuals who cause the threat), and


3. where individuals are relatively incapable of protecting themselves.

Point 'c' is extremely contentious, since it involves blanket restrictions on public speech - and sometimes on private speech as well - in order to serve the purported interests of "society". This is highly relevant in the Internet content regulation debate, and in the existing forced "self-regulatory" scheme which covers electronic and print media.
 

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4 - Criteria for deciding whether there needs to be government/industry-based regulation

 

Q 1 Is there a threat to people, individually or collectively?

 

Q 2 How well can the individuals protect themselves from the threat?

 

Q 3 How well can the government, or industry, systematically protect the victim?

 

Q 4 What side effects are there of personal defences, government or industry-based regulatory approaches?

 

Q 5 Do the benefits of government/industry regulation outweigh those of allowing protection to remain the responsibility of the consumer?

 

If the regulatory concern is more to do with costs and quality of service - for instance poor telephone service and/or excessively high charges and/or deceptive marketing - then two more questions might be relevant:

 

Q 6 To what extent is the service essential?

 

Q 7 To what degree is the supply of that service a monopoly?

 

These questions would produce very different answers if asked in relation to telephone services in regional areas, or Internet Service Providers in the city. In the former case, telephony is an essential service, and Telstra has a monopoly on its supply. In the later case, Internet connectivity is not (yet) an essential service and there are hundreds of ISPs to choose from. Therefore the need for some kind of regulation in regional telephony is very strong - because there are no market mechanisms due to the lack of choice. In the case of ISPs in the city, while there may be some bad ones - just like soft-bananas in the greengrocer - it is relatively easy for consumers to pick a healthier one. So in the case of ISPs in the city, regulatory action would be harder to justify - unless perhaps a very large number of ISPs were incompetent and/or exploitative.
 
 

Here are the first five questions applied to some examples: outbound telemarketing, unsolicited commercial email, and exposure of children to disturbing material in three situations - in shops, on TV and via the Internet.
 
 

Q 1 Is there a threat to people, individually or collectively?

 

In general this is a simple matter: Does the person concerned believe there is a threat?

There are some subtleties in handling this question properly. There could be cases where the person believes there is a threat, but the belief is provably false. There could be cases where one person was speaking on behalf of another, for instance a child - who is asserted to be unable to know their own long-term interests - but those assertions are questionable. An individual could be unaware of a threat, or disbelieving of it - but the threat (for instance disease from smoking) might be provable and serious.

The threat to a "collective" of people can be problematic - since this may depend on assertions about the welfare of a group of people, rather than testimony from the many individuals themselves. Point 'c' above - enhancing national unity and "social standards" - is a case where assertions are made by one or more individuals, about many individuals' well-being being dependent on a group they are asserted to belong to (for instance, they have beliefs or tastes in common), followed by assertions about threats to the group.

Some examples:

1 - Unwanted phone calls, in particular telemarketing calls, are a threat to individuals because such calls distract and annoy them and tie up their telephone. (More discussion below.)

2 - Unsolicited SPAM email is a threat to individuals because it distracts and annoys them, and causes increased Internet costs for them.

3 - Children are threatened by the availability of certain text, graphic, sound, video and computer game material, on paper, on CD, via radio, television or the Internet or in computer games. The damage consists of short-term upset and confusion and/or long-term damage to their sensibilities, sense of personal integrity and safety and to their ability to fit into society.

The display of material in public areas of shops is subject to legislation detailed at the OFLC site:

http://www.oflc.gov.au/pubrate.html#covers

To what degree it is respected is another matter. I personally support these display restrictions, but that is not the issue. I use this as an example in which government regulation plays a protective role, where individual defences are impractical and unrestrained market forces would lead to problems for children.

Apart from some recalcitrant marketing types, no-one would debate the first two points. The third involves a wider range of situations, and involves more complex questions of long-term health, and the exact effects of particular material on particular children in particular situations. However most people would agree that to some extent there is a threat. Toddler's growing up watching nothing but erotica/porn videos are likely to have problems becoming well-adjusted adults (whatever that means!). The threat to children is difficult to determine. Its easy to overestimate the damage - children are naturally adapted to seeing some intense things in hunter-gather society - but television, video games and explicit erotica/pornography are arguably more distracting or disturbing.

1 - In the case of telemarketing and other unwanted phone calls, there is no effective personal defence. Calling Number Display is useless - you can't know the telemarketer's numbers and they may not allow their display anyway. Answering machines are useless - telemarketers leave messages. Unlisted numbers can help - but not everyone can have unlisted numbers, and telemarketers can ring numbers randomly. The key issue is that the telephone is a very dumb piece of customer equipment, with a very dumb interface to the telephone network. It is not possible for the user to engineer an effective defence against telemarketing calls.

In the case of telemarketing, the victims cannot protect themselves.

2 - Like telemarketing, ideally SPAM would simply not be sent. In contrast to the telephone an Internet-connected computer is a very sophisticated piece of customer equipment. It can send and receive messages to any other Internet connected computer - including to servers which enable it to reliably identify most SPAM. The Internet provides the customer equipment with the most sophisticated possible connection to the global network. So SPAM filtering at the user's computer it technically possible and is being developed rapidly. It involves relatively little traffic cost, and like all Internet functionality is being rapidly developed as software which will be available at little or no cost. In addition, there are techniques at the ISP which can prevent SPAM reaching the customer's machine - but this needs to be carefully administered so as to be certain not to block email other than SPAM.

In the case of SPAM email, the victims can defend themselves, either on their own computer, or with the ISP's.

3 - In the case of children being exposed to disturbing material, in some or many cases they cannot protect themselves. For instance if the material is displayed at eye-height in a newsagent or milk-bar, they can't help but see it. If the violent material - say a news flash of a massacre - is inserted in a children's television program, they can't help but see it.

However, it is also reasonable to consider that children are not left to wander the streets, shops or the Internet alone - there is always one or more responsible adults. If the erotica/porn magazines at the local shop or service station cannot reasonably be avoided by adults with children in their care, or the disturbing advert or newsflash in the TV program cannot be foreseen - then there is a problem. Neither the children nor their responsible adult can reliably protect them. The same would be true if disturbing material appeared without warning during an adult-supervised Internet session.

There are many possible cases, but in general I suggest that disturbing material in public places, or out-of-place on TV is something that cannot be defended against by the victim or the responsible adult. Disturbing content in video games at home and via the Internet can be defended against by the responsible adult - there are few surprises in either area. What few "child-disturbing" things are available via the WWW don't just pop up as a surprise - you have to go looking for them. So the personal defences are direct adult supervision - or the use of a filtering system, such as one that only accepts material for which PICS labels reliably indicate that the material meets the adult's particular criteria for suitability for the child in question.

1 - In the case of telemarketing, government regulation concerning systematically unacceptable telecommunications would control telemarketing very well. (More discussion later.) There could conceivably be a carrier industry control scheme, and perhaps even a "telemarketing industry" control scheme - but the latter is unlikely since outbound telemarketing is inherently an exploitative practice and there is no real outbound telemarketing "industry". (The majority of telemarketing, and the primary interest of the Australian Telemarketing Association, is inbound telemarketing - the handling of inquiries and orders when consumers call the business. Don't believe the wild estimates for how important telemarketing is to the economy - most telemarketing is inbound, and the outbound telemarketers are professional bullshit-artists.)

As long as outbound telemarketing calls primarily originate within the one country, then Federal government legislation and regulatory attention is capable of almost entirely removing the burden of outbound telemarketing from consumers and businesses. As international call costs fall, it could be trickier to implement international control schemes - but it would still be possible with cooperation from carriers and/or foreign governments.

2 - In the case of SPAM email, the majority of it originates from the USA. Therefore, unless there were harmonised laws in both countries, and suitably funded regulatory agency responses, then most victims in Australia would not be protected from the USA sourced SPAM. In fact, since the SPAMmers can effectively send email from any country whatsoever, legislative SPAM control would be useless unless every country had a full-strength regulatory response. Even if this was the case, SPAM email would be very difficult to stop reliably, since there are so many ways of tricking computers into sending email on someone-else's behalf. (The Internet email system has no authentication requirements for sending - it was designed to be used by responsible people. In hindsight, this was a serious mistake.)

Both the evidentiary difficulties and the international jurisdictional barriers mean that government attempts at controlling SPAM are doomed to failure, except perhaps be preventing SPAM originating physically in one country - which would not prevent residents in that country making it physically originate from somewhere else.

3 - In the case of children being exposed to disturbing material, both industry codes of conduct and government regulations could probably solve the problems of erotica/pornography in public places, and of inappropriate material located in childrens' television programs. This does not solve the problem of the 6.30 news - where adult fascination with murder and mayhem causes the news people to scour the Earth for such disturbing fare, and serve it up at family dinner time. Government regulation or industry self-regulation could in principle be effective - but only by directly challenging the adult demand for gut wrenching material in the most popular TV program, and by introducing censorship which is likely to have negative consequences for public awareness and debate. (Imagine if film of the Vietnam war was never shown on the 6.30 news because it was disturbing to children - our involvement in it might have been prolonged.)

As with SPAM control, the evidentiary and international jurisdictional barriers to stopping disturbing material at the source - for instance the web-site - are doomed to failure. Technically it is impossible to reliably block certain web or other Internet content at national borders, or at the ISP, whilst retaining a proper useable Internet service. (See http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr/contreg/ )

Government regulations or industry codes could conceivably largely control "child-disturbing" content - or any other content - on web sites physically located in Australia, but web sites can be physically located anywhere in the world, whether their names end in ".au" or not - so such regulation would not affect anyone who did not want to be subject to it. There would be major financial and social costs in any such scheme - as will be discussed in Q 4.

Government and industry support for the development of PICS labelling and filtering systems is probably a very good idea - as long as it is directed at supporting filtering controlled by the responsible adult. This supports intelligent, personally directed filtering by the responsible adult - rather than blanket filtering or banning of material at national borders or at ISPs. (Any proposal by government to make all World Wide Web material "kiddy-safe" is, of course, utterly impractical and unjustifiable.)

 1 - Telemarketing - personal defences:

Attempts to use answering machines to screen calls, to have unlisted numbers, and perhaps to use CND to refuse to answer calls without displayable numbers cause all sorts of problems for callers and receivers. (They are all largely ineffective anyway.)

Telemarketing - government regulation:

The definition of telemarketing is non-trivial - so it might be better to avoid this and work with a broader target of those callers who systematically make hundreds or thousands of calls which people complain about. A narrow definition of telemarketing might be ineffective and a broad definition, with draconian enforcement, would affect other perfectly acceptable calls. There are ways of doing it without causing excessive costs, confusion and most importantly without burdening consumers and targeted businesses.

Telemarketing - industry self or "self" regulation

In principle, carriers could deny connection to known telemarketers (this would require an amendment to the Telco Act). There would be questions and practical difficulties with this, since the carriers make good money from the telemarketers millions of short calls. Also there would be questions of freedom of communication. Denying someone the ability to communicate is a serious matter, only to be taken as a last resort - and then by an open, unbiased, accountable process. This would also require all carriers to agree to the same standards - otherwise one carrier might be tempted to be lax and gain some extra call revenues from telemarketers. It's not as attractive as government regulation.

The thought of the telemarketers regulating themselves is a joke - since virtually the entire population find telemarketing unacceptable, effective regulation means extinguishment of most outbound telemarketing.
 

2 - SPAM - Personal defences

It may take a year or two to evolve, but email client programs with good SPAM control - by checking incoming emails with constantly updated databases at centralised servers - is a practical, easy-to-manage low- or no-cost solution. Most importantly it puts the SPAM management in the hands of the user, whilst automating it in a configurable way. The only danger with this is having the system reject email which was not SPAM. If this merely involves copying the SPAM to a special mail-box, which the user can look through occasionally to check for personal email, then it's not a major danger. In fact, the vast majority of SPAM can be automatically filtered out very reliably - and the evasive measures SPAMmers could take to avoid this would be costly, easily detected and so added to the filtering criteria - globally, within minutes.

SPAM - ISP based defences

Basically the same as for personal defences. The advantage is that the user never has to bother with SPAM filtering (other than perhaps configuring how their ISP filters their incoming email) and also never has to pay for the download time (which may be a cent or so per SPAM). Rejected email could be stored for a while in a web-accessible location so users could scan the subject and sender lines and/or read the emails to make sure they were not missing anything important.

SPAM - Government or industry approaches

Nothing would be gained by government or industry approaches which attempt to deal with SPAM at the receiving ISP - because market forces are already leading ISPs to offer this in response to customer demand. Government or industry schemes only make sense by stopping SPAM at its source. As noted above, this would be impossible in any reliable, global, manner. It would involve governments or formal industry schemes getting involved in denying people (generally SPAMmers, but perhaps by mistake others) from communicating. Government control of communication is a very dangerous thing and should only be used for serious matters, and as a last resort. Telemarketing is more serious than SPAM, and government control is both the effective and the only way to control telemarketing.
 

3 - Disturbing material for children - Personal defences

In the case of erotica/pornography on display in shops, a personal defence would involve the inconvenience and probably impracticality of not taking children into shops.

In the case of material on television - it might involve having children not watch much television. Some people would consider that unacceptable, while others (such as myself) regard virtually all adverts and many programs on commercial TV as disturbing for children . . . and adults . . .

The personal defences for disturbing Internet material: adult supervision and PICS filtering, have side-effects. Adult supervision takes time, and means the child is not free to "roam" or communicate freely - but has the advantage of children spending more time with adults. This should lead to more shared adult-child experiences - something that has been lost in recent decades with long work hours and the domination of the television. The joint web-surfing (or whatever else, such as Internet Relay Chat, interactive games etc.) should be a voyage of discovery. Hopefully it would be more than just looking and discovering, but will be a contribution to the great variety of human perspectives supported by Internet communications.

The side effects of PICS filtering would depend very much on the circumstances. Most likely it would restrict the child to accessing material intended for children - but it would also probably restrict them to a small subset of the material which actually exists and which might be of value to them. PICS-filtered Internet should not be seen as a modern baby-sitter - but Internet communications are typically two way, more sophisticated, less distracting and less manipulative than television.

Disturbing material for children - Government and industry approaches

Government and industry support for the development of PICS labelling and filtering systems to be controlled by the responsible adult is fine - I can't see any negative side-effects as long as the labelling and filtering is fully responsive to the needs of individual children and adults. Unfortunately this task is extremely daunting - if not impossible. As a result, some recent developments in PICS labelling seem destined to result in a dumbed-down set of criteria, suitable perhaps for certain mainstream values systems, and useless for the value systems of others.

There are strong tensions between making a labelling system sophisticated enough to encompass the concerns of millions of people, with different cultures and personal priorities - with a system simple enough for mortal web-masters/mistresses to administer and for the majority of responsible adults to set filtering criteria for.

The result of a dumbed-down system, applied bluntly in homes, schools and libraries, would be to introduce massive filtering restrictions controlled by the label makers (since recent proposals do not trust the labels generated by the content authors) and so to a centralised defacto global filtering system - which is exactly what PICS was intended to avoid.
 

 This involves the following analysis:

To the extent that the threat is a serious problem (Q1), how does the effectiveness and negative side-effects of self-defence (Q2 & Q 4) compare to the effectiveness and negative side effects of government industry regulation (Q3 & Q4)?

To justify government or industry regulation:

A - The threats needs to be a serious enough matter, and

B - The government/industry approach needs to be clearly more effective than the personal defences, and

C - After considering the costs and negative side-effects of government/industry regulation, the benefits to all those affected (and this may go beyond the people being protected) need to be carefully considered before the decision is made to regulate.

Otherwise leave it to personal defences and market forces!

Looking at the telemarketing, SPAM and "disturbing material" questions:

Telemarketing:

A - Outbound telemarketing is a multimillion dollar burden and many other things besides. It is a serious problem already - and considering that it could get to the state in the USA, of several calls per day to each home, it has the potential to be a scourge on the Australian people and a threat to our national character. Its serious!

B - The government (and potentially industry) approach has an excellent chance of success, at a far lower cost than the current drain telemarketing places on the public. In contrast, there are no effective personal defences.

C - In a properly designed and non-draconian scheme (and governments don't have a perfect track record in regulatory matters . . .) there are no significant side-effects whatsoever.

Government/industry control for telemarketing? Definitely!

(As will be explained below, the current Ministerial Council of Consumer Affairs government/industry approach is absolutely worst-case - it does not restrict telemarketing at all.)
 
 

SPAM

A - SPAM email is a damn nuisance, and causes extra cost and wasted time for most email users. (I currently get 2 or 3 a day). Its not a social disaster. (Telemarketing is - it creates distrust and time-wasting telephone practices.) SPAM is a problem well worth solving before it gets any worse.

B - Self-defence, using software filters on the user's computer or at the ISP has excellent prospects for eliminating almost all SPAM, for minimal cost and few, if any, side effects. Government/industry action targeting the sources of SPAM are likely to be at best partially effective.

C - Government/industry SPAM source control is nowhere near as effective as filtering it at the user's machine, or at their ISP. The potential side-effects of government involvement in communications are another negative.

Government/industry control for SPAM? No!
 

Disturbing material - in retail shops

A - Its probably not a total disaster - especially now that the most explicit magazines from the USA now have largely opaque wrappers. (This could just be the situation in Victoria - but this is a direct, positive result of recent state government regulatory activity and probably federal legislation and the work of the OFLC.)

B - Self-defence is possible, but impractical. Government mandated covering of the magazine's covers - or better still banning their display in the main area of shops - would be very effective and would not inconvenience those it is intended to protect.

C - The benefits of government control are considerable. Indeed things would probably be much worse without it - these magazines are quick-selling, high profit items, and shops have a direct financial incentive to display them openly to catch the eye of the largely male clientele who buy them. The side effects of partially covering the covers are negligible - keen customers can peek and see what the image and text is. The side effects of banishing these magazines to a non-general area of the shop would involve a slight inconvenience for the buyers, and significant costs for the seller - but these costs could easily be passed on to the purchaser, by a moderate increase in the magazine's price.
 

Government/industry control for disturbing material on display in shops? So-far so good with the largely opaque cover-bags in Victoria. I think it would be entirely justifiable for government regulation to ban the display of sexually explicit (and grossly violent?) material in non-specialist shops - except in restricted areas. (I fully support the availability of a wide range of erotica/pornography - this is a question about whether erotic material should be displayed in areas frequented by the general public.)
 
 

Disturbing material - on TV

A - Views on what is disturbing for children vary widely. Personally I think TV adverts are disturbing and it wouldn't be a bad idea if children never watched commercial TV - provided there was a credible alternative. There's no clear consensus on the problem, but for the purposes of the argument, lets assume that disturbing adverts, promotions and news-flashes are a problem in children's programs.

B - Self-defence, other than by turning the TV off, is ineffective. Government or industry controls could be very effective.

C - Its undesirable for governments to be meddling in the content of communications - but it could be argued that the control of certain material in children's programs did not constitute a serious threat to adult debate and freedom of communication.

More government/industry regulation of disturbing material in children's programs? It depends entirely how the various arguments are weighed. I haven't researched it enough to have a well informed opinion, but I would say "Yes".
 

Disturbing material - on the World Wide Web

A - I don't think it is a serious matter at present. If it was, there would be many reports of children, left to their own devices with an Internet connected computer, encountering or seeking out all sorts of disturbing material. I can't think of such a report. If it were a significant problem, elements of the mass media would make a big fuss about it. It is a potential problem.

B - Self-defence by adult supervision is entirely effective and has many benefits. Relying on PICS labels and filtering could be acceptable - but it is early days yet. Government attempts to stop material erotica/pornography on web sites can at best affect only the web sites physically located in that country. Governments may be able to make a valuable contribution to a sophisticated PICS labelling system - but recent PICS developments (PICSRules 1.1) have been criticised for being too simple and for being aimed at facilitating centralised control, rather than by the responsible adult.

C - No government initiatives for restricting Internet content at the source can be effective, acceptable in terms of freedom of speech, or practical. Government support of the development of sophisticated PICS labelling is not a form of regulation, but a way of supporting individual responsible adults to meet the government's objectives of protecting children from disturbing material
 

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5 - Strengths and weaknesses of government regulation, industry self-regulation and forced-self-regulation

If an industry is fundamentally in tune with the needs of the public, and the government is not - as is the case with Internet Content Regulation - then "forced-self-regulation" is clearly the poorer alternative because industry has been cowed into submission, forced to implement controls which neither the ISPs nor the public want, simply because of the threat of direct government regulation.

Where an industry is fundamentally at odds with the public interest - for instance outbound telemarketing - then self-regulation is likely to be an exercise in window-dressing. In these circumstances, the government forcing the industry to regulate its activities so as to protect the public should lead to a better outcome. As discussed below, the recent step towards forced-self-regulation for outbound telemarketing shows no evidence that the government is interested in protecting the public. So in a case such as this, when the forced-self-regulatory approach turns out to be useless for protecting consumers, it is arguably worse than a self-regulatory approach, or no regulation at all because it endorses the exploitative conduct and carries the imprimatur of the government.

In principle, a well designed set of government regulations, when administered by a well run regulator, can provide many benefits:

1. There is a relatively clear path for an aggrieved consumer to follow.


2. The regulators are clearly independent of the industry they are regulating.


3. The regulations and the conduct of the regulators are directly under the control of the government, and so, in theory, the public.


4. The inner workings of the regulator are subject to FOI.


5. Disputed regulatory decisions can be appealed in court or in suitable tribunals.

Crafting a fair, efficient, responsive and adaptable regulatory mechanism - one that is suited to the complex, changing and unpredictable nature of the real world - is a major task. Some of the regulatory framework needs to be "hard-wired" in the legislation. Some of it needs to be implemented as discretion on a case-by-case basis by the regulator.

The regulatory agency needs to remain responsive to the real needs of the public - not just what the regulatory staff conveniently conceive of as the needs of the public. There's no simple solution to such problems, since whenever you put people in large buildings, with windows that don't open, all sorts of aberrant organisational behaviour is likely to develop. The regulatory agency needs to have regular contact with real consumers and with well-resourced consumer advocates. Without this, it invariably becomes unduly influenced by the lobbying of the industry is supposed to be regulating, or by the demands of other arms of government.

The agency needs to be able to use its expertise to inquire into problem areas - including fields which border on its area of responsibility. When new problems develop which do not fit directly into the narrow legalistic interpretation of any agency's area of responsibility - it is vital that some agency own and explore them - otherwise the problem would fall between the cracks and not be recognised by any government or industry agency. (As has happened with Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace.)

A good example of this expansive process was AUSTEL's Privacy Inquiry of 1992. This was aimed at researching problems including Calling Number Display, reverse telephone directories and outbound telemarketing - including the use of automated calling equipment. There were quite a few other issues that it should also have covered, such as Malicious Call Trace and itemised billing. In an ideal world, this small team of people would have had the resources and approval to tackle these and other issues too. In fact, they had their work cut out for them with the initial issues. The Inquiry could have been better advertised, but it did receive input from many individuals, consumer organisations, from industry and from government. It held public seminars and met privately with individuals and organisations. It produced a report which has many strengths. (This was before the popularity of the Internet - so it is not on the web.)

While its easy to see how the AUSTEL Privacy Inquiry could have been more expansive, it is a good example of a regulator making an excellent, public, effort to delve into problem areas for which no specific regulatory arrangements had yet been made. Unfortunately, other than delaying the introduction of Calling Number Display, and leading to the eventual creation of the AUSTEL Privacy Advisory Committee, its hard to see where the report of the Inquiry has had the positive influence it should have had.

As an individual, and later as a representative of Consumers Telecommunications Network, I found that in general, AUSTEL staff were highly supportive of consumers and took their consumer protection role very seriously. Unfortunately, AUSTEL was not able to take real action on new areas which were not hard-wired into the Act which defined its powers. Arguably this is as it should be - the agency should advise on new regulatory approaches, but it should not be able to expand its influence beyond that anticipated by Parliament.

The trouble is, nowhere in the telecommunications field, is there a reliable process for new or existing problems to be "owned" by any agency, or for DoCA, the government or AUSTEL/ACA/ACCC to progress the issue. Its really up to the Minister to decide that something needs to be looked at - and to allocate resources in DoCA and or the ACA to investigate what needs to be done. Then it is a matter of either making Ministerial directives or taking it to Cabinet, creating some new legislation and getting it though Parliament.

The fact is, that with the sheer number of issues, and their complexity, and the finite time and mental resources of the people concerned, and the limited amount of funding that governments are willing to spend on regulatory activities, a lot of important issues are never given proper attention - and those that are recognised are often handled inadequately.

This is primarily a result of government not taking its regulatory responsibilities seriously. With appropriate funding, and careful attention to management, all the issues mentioned below in the case studies could be satisfactorily resolved - very often with a judicious government regulatory approach and sometimes with self-regulation.

If the government was serious about protecting the public in the complex, privacy threatening, economically and socially crucial telecommunications industry, then a great deal more would be achieved. It may cost a few more millions of dollars, perhaps a few tens of millions over a few years - but this is a dollar or two per-annum per capita - a small price to pay.

I do not accept that the deficiencies in current government regulatory approaches are fundamental. It is possible to run responsive, accountable regulatory systems - but it takes adequate funding and good management so that the best people are recruited and given the resources they need.

Industry-based regulatory schemes have certain potential advantages over a government scheme. They may be operated by people with more intimate experience of the industry and of the public's use of its products and services. This is fundamentally a good thing, since the greatest problem in any large "organisation" is the length of the feedback loops between the public (where the action happens and regulatory decisions matter) and the relatively remote and rarefied realms where the crucial decisions are made.

Single person businesses have no such problems with long feedback loops! Large "organisations" - whether government or commercial - can have terrible trouble with long feed-back loops which delay, attenuate and distort feedback so much that the decision makers may be very poorly placed to make the right choices. I didn't find this too much of a problem with AUSTEL, or with DoCA. It is a huge problem with an "organisation" the size of Telstra.

An industry-based self-regulatory organisation can in principle be small enough not to suffer like Telstra or the larger government departments do from inadequate connection with reality. So to can a well-run government regulatory body - but it takes funding, good management, good staff and constant attention to detail.

An oft-cited benefit of self-regulation is that the costs are borne by the industry (and therefore the customers of that industry) rather than the tax-payer. Here are two contrary arguments:

Firstly, a government run regulator can easily be funded by a levy on the industry. This becomes more administratively costly when there are many companies active in the industry - as is now the case with telecommunications - but it is still true in principle. This approach would be difficult where the participants in the "industry" are not keen to identify themselves - for instance outbound telemarketing which is often an activity of a business, rather than the sole function of a business. Also, in the case of telemarketing, where effective regulation would close down the great majority of current outbound telemarketers, there would be a tiny remaining base from which to extract funding.

Secondly and more importantly, in the fields of privacy and telephony - and increasing with Internet communications as it becomes as ubiquitous as telephony - the benefits of the regulatory activities are shared by virtually the entire population. As such, if there are serious difficulties extracting funding from the industry itself, there should be no problem with funding it from general revenue.

An advantage of industry self-regulation is that is in principle more adaptable to changing circumstances. The industry body simply needs to decide on some new rules, check with the ACCC that they are not anti-competitive (and justify them if they are) and implement them. This is a lot snappier than amending Acts of Parliament, or preparing and passing disallowable instruments.

If the industry body was genuinely interested in the real priorities of the public, and it was adequately funded, respected by the industry in general, and it had the powers it needed to protect the public, then the industry-based self-regulatory approach could be more responsive than a one based on legislation and a government regulatory agency.

However there are a number of problems with self-regulatory approaches. These problems are fundamental and I believe much harder to resolve than the task of properly funding and managing a government regulatory agency to achieve excellent outcomes.

1 - The staff and funding of the industry body is very closely coupled to the industry it is supposed to be regulating. Industry participants can obtain a short- or long-term financial advantage from the exploitative practices the industry body is supposed to be preventing - so why should the industry fund the body to the degree necessary for it to carry out its work? (Answer: in theory, the long-term threat of government regulation - but this is a very weak incentive.)

Similarly, why would the industry support the best, most critically and independently minded people leaving productive employment to work for the industry body? Those people would need to be offered high salaries commensurate with their earning potential in the commercial world.

2 - There are significant "political" and administrative problems in deciding how to levy industry participants to pay for the industry body. This is especially true when there is a 10,000 to 1 ratio difference in size between the largest and smallest participants - for instance between Telstra and smaller ISPs.

3 - In an industry where the participants are not clearly defined (eg. telemarketing) and/or where the industry scheme is not compulsory (it could only be compulsory if it was a forced-self-regulatory scheme with legislative backing - for instance the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman), then the costs of the scheme are borne by the larger and/or more responsible participants - while consumer problems and therefore industry body activities are driven disproportionately by the "bad-egg", "cowboy" operators who are less likely to be funding the industry body.

4 - It can be bad enough, when a consumer encounters a problem, deciding which government regulatory domain best covers the case. However the task of finding the right "home" for a complaint is greatly exacerbated by a profusion of industry based schemes. For instance how are consumers to know, when they receive a call purporting to be a market-research call, but which develops into a sales call, whether this should be covered by:

• The Association of Australian Market Research Organisations' (AMRO's) and the Market Research Society of Australia's (MRSA's) excellent (I believe) voluntarily self-regulatory scheme,


• By the ACCC as a matter of false pretences in business,


• By some yet-to-be-created industry or (preferably!) government approach to telemarketing (or the current ADMA's code for telemarketers - which prohibits such calls - but few telemarketers are members of ADMA. )


• Whether they should complain to their telephone company about the company allowing such unwanted calls to be made to their service.


• The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.


• Whether they should make a complaint to the state, or is it the federal, police about a phone call which they believe to be malicious.

Assuming they do figure out which path to take (and the first three are the most likely candidates) how do they prove who made the call? At present they cannot, since there is no Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace service - and even if there was, would it be applicable if the call was not deemed to fit the criteria of 85 ZE of the Crimes Act? (Yes, it might - the TIO can access such call data, in confidence, if it relates to an investigation of theirs - but would the TIO be involved in this? Probably not - unless the call was believed to come from one of its participants.)

Many other examples could be given. The fact is that the more industry based self-regulatory schemes there are, the more difficulty there is for consumers to complain about problems - so the feedback loop is less likely to begin.

Who is to decide which industry body or regulatory agency should "own" the problem - if none of them deem it to be in their territory? I don't think there is any system at all. If it is a privacy matter, ideally the Privacy Commissioner's department should be able look into it - but currently that only works for problems caused by government agencies - not by companies or charities.
 

5 - What are the appeal processes if the consumer does not believe the industry body has adequately addressed their problem? Each industry based body is likely to have its own arrangements for this. They are likely to be difficult to follow, and not very timely. Is legal aid likely to be available for such appeals? What legal basis is there for appealing to the courts if the industry appeal process is thought to be defective?

6 - The public accountability of industry bodies is likely to be poor. I was the sole consumer rep. on the AUSTEL Mobile Churn Committee. We were supposed to devise an industry self-regulatory scheme, and establish an industry body, to cover solely the change of service between carriers for mobile phone contracts. Not sales of new contracts, or sales of handsets. Not closing an analogue account and opening a digital mobile account. Probably not even changing from one digital contract to another. Some of the carrier representatives were extraordinary - denying that consumers hated telemarketing, for instance. (They were extremely antagonistic to consumers and in this case, the AUSTEL chair of the committee was extremely weak.)

This committee lumbered along and eventually got nowhere - but it did propose an industry body with virtually no consumer input to its management, and with no effective external audit or reporting procedures.

The fact that the industry is regulated by a body which is owned, funded and managed by that industry means that consumers will have very little confidence that the body has real teeth, is independent and accountable.

It is fashionable at present in government circles not to over-regulate (unless of course it concerns Internet porn . . or perhaps cryptography. ). While there are attractive arguments for devolving responsibility and allowing industries to regulate themselves, there are fundamental weaknesses with self-regulation. These may not be such an issue in a relatively stable industry, with large, easily recognised participants, which already has established high standards regarding privacy and customer care - such as insurance and banking (though there were some rorts in insurance at least . . . and I am not active in these fields, so perhaps I underestimate the problems). However in a rapidly growing field, where there are many rapacious new-entrants and especially in a field of such technical and human complexity as communications, I doubt that industry self-regulation - including that which is forced by governments - will be effective.

It could be argued that the weaknesses and costs of previous government regulatory regimes are arguments for an industry self-regulatory approach. That may be - but they are also arguments for proper funding and careful management of government regulatory schemes to achieve an excellent outcome.

Without wanting to make too much of rhetorical argument by analogy, would it be better to appoint and independently fund a fresh group of people to control the burglary industry, or to tell the burglars to form their own self-regulatory system - on threat of the government getting a fresh group of people to control them if the burglars fail to really respect the public's interest?

That said, there are instances where industries spontaneously form their own non-compulsory code of conduct, and all, or virtually all, participants join the scheme and respect it. An example of this is the codes of conduct for market research supported by The Association of Australian Market Research Organisations and the Market Research Society of Australia. (http://www.mrsa.com.au) When I last looked at this a few years ago, my impression was that virtually every market research company was a member of AMRO and complied with its code of conduct - which precludes such things as telemarketing and push-polling. (This does not stop anyone at all from offering what they call market research services, but an astute client would avoid any company that was not a member of AMRO.)

The market research industry struck me as genuinely professional. Its clients are businesses and other organisations such as government agencies. The industry depends entirely on the cooperation of the public, and on proper research methodologies, in order to produce valid results. It is a long-term, stable industry. Therefore it is not surprising that it has long upheld high standards of conduct.

Market research and other professional industries are very different from the rapid-growth, dog-eat-dog, hunting-and-herding telecommunications industry, which feed directly from the pockets of millions of impressionable consumers.

If an industry needs regulation, beyond that which it independently develops - if it needs to be forced by government to self-regulate - then there it is doubtful whether the government will really be able to ensure that the self-regulation properly respects the needs of the public.

The dynamics of this forced self-regulation are likely to be that it will always be testing the government's patience. The primary aim of telecommunications businesses (indeed the formal responsibility to their shareholders) is to build business and maximise profits. That means they would be happiest with no regulation - other than to curtail predatory competitors. (This was the primary concern of the Mobile Churn carrier representatives - at one stage I was told that the code was to prevent unfair business practices - unfair to other businesses - and that the code was specifically not intended for the benefit of consumers. They changed their tune later when the ACCC became involved!)

Collectively the industry is forced to work together to set up a body to regulate them all. This is roughly equivalent to the students forming a committee to police the "no foul language" rule in the playground - they aren't going to put themselves under the control of their best and brightest. So the priorities of the industry are:

1. Spend as little time and money on the industry body as possible.


2. Try to ensure that the regulatory policy and/or its enforcement has as little impact as possible on their profitability.


3. The limit to the two above priorities is to convince the government that the industry self-regulatory policy is either working, or close enough to working, to prevent them from actually closing the scheme down and enacting legislation.

Far better to have a well funded, well managed government regulatory body, with teeth and an expansive vision of its responsibilities, such as the ACCC! (Forgetting for a moment their involvement in telemarketing . . . )

The industry forced-self-regulation scheme adds at least one more layer of indirection. With government regulation, if it fails, the citizen can get their local member of Parliament to question the responsible Minister. The responsibility is with the Minister, and the query propagates to the Department, and perhaps to the regulatory body concerned. Now, in the telecommunications industry, it may propagate through DoCA, ACA, ACCC, TIO, ACIF, various ACIF committees and the company concerned.

When, eventually, the consumer decides that the regulatory system has failed, its more complex to get anything changed. Maybe the ACIF would respond - but if they don't, then who's responsibility is it? The Minister rattles the sabre of long-term regulatory action and says it's industry's responsibility to regulate itself - but he can't tell them exactly how to do it, and nor can ACA or the ACCC. Why? Because this is industry self-regulation! Most likely nothing will happen The best case is that the ACIF, would develop a new policy, persuade the great majority of the industry to accept it and then effectively implement it. But what resources and real independence does the ACIF have? Even if its staff are dedicated to consumer benefit, it is managed and financed by the industry whose excesses it is supposed to be controlling.

The time-delays and inertia in all of this are almost certain to ensure that very little consumer benefit emerges. ACIF will be flat out trying to do its work anyway, without developing new proposals which will effectively constrain profitable, exploitative corporate behaviour. The final tasks of getting the majority of the industry to agree to the new constraint, and to fund the effective administration of that constraint are tough barriers. Over the years, it is possible that ACIF will become weak and dispirited - a pawn between a powerful industry that does not want to be regulated and a government that is unwilling to admit that self-regulation was a mistake, and perhaps a government that doesn't care too much about the public anyway.

Let's hope this analysis proves to be completely wrong!   In the past I have been an optimist about telecommunications regulation - only to see my hopes dashed because of poorly funded regulators with no powers (ACA and the Privacy Commissioner's office), and a government that doesn't care.

Another significant and unavoidable problem with the self-regulatory model is that delegation of responsibility can lead to in-expert interpretations of the code-of-conduct. Where breaches of the code are punishable by draconian or criminal penalties, this can lead the restrictive nature of the code to be over-amplified. For instance, accepting for the sake of the argument that material on Australian web sites must not be that which would be refused classification by the OFLC, and that criminal penalties will apply to ISPs who allow such material on their servers, the practical expression of the government's intent is likely to be greatly skewed by the over-cautious judgement of ISPs in assessing whether or not material would be classified or not.

Considering:

1. While the criteria for RC publications is defined at:

http://www.oflc.gov.au/pubrate.html#refuse

the judgement of the censors on what may be refused classification changes over time, and has been the subject of extended court cases. (For instance the Rabelais case which went to the highest courts to decide whether an article "instructed in matters of crime". The question of classification of films is something separate.


2. The paucity of information about exactly what is refused classification - unless perhaps you pay $380 a year to subscribe to the OFLC's database,


3. The vastly more varied material which ISPs are likely to encounter compared to the commercial film, publications and video games which are submitted to the OFLC.


4. The completely different nature, context and mode of communication of material on web-sites compared to the OFLC's work on film and publications.

The best laws are practical to enforce, easy for normal people to understand, and involve penalties which scale with the degree to which they are broken. In addition, the best laws inspire broad respect.

The worst laws are those which are difficult for ordinary people to understand, which involve interpretative subtleties that could keep a Supreme Court busy for a week, and which involve penalties way out of proportion to the way they are broken.

A law which expects an ISP to decide whether web based material would be "refused classification", on threat of criminal penalties if they misjudge it - especially when the community has little respect for Internet censorship - is an example of the very worst kind of law.
 

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6 - Criteria for deciding between legislation and government backed "self-regulation"

Characteristics of an industry which would make it more likely that government backed self-regulation would be more effective than direct government regulation:

• The industry has clearly identified participants.


• The participants are stable companies, operating in a professional way - ie. they provide sophisticated, high-value services to customers who are likely to be informed and discerning.


• The industry has already demonstrated its commitment to the public interest by a large proportion of participants joining a self-regulation scheme, or an industry association which genuinely promotes respect for the real needs of the public.


• The products are highly differentiated and perhaps personalised. Competition is based on quality of service, more than on price - ie. the product or service is not a commodity.


• The relationship between supplier and customer is long term, and based on more personal methods of contact rather than mass-market advertising and quick, impersonal transactions. This, together, potentially with the smaller size of businesses, puts the decision makers in closer contact with the public.


• The industry prospers without the use of intrusive or manipulative marketing approaches - including telemarketing, street solicitation, door-to-door advertising and high-pressure radio and television advertising.

• Participants in the "industry" are difficult to clearly identify. Especially if the focus of regulation is not an "industry" but an activity which is generally a peripheral function of organisations whose core businesses are unrelated - for instance telemarketing by a variety of companies and charities.


• The participants include many small and new companies, especially in a high-growth area such as telecommunications.


• There either has not been any meaningful attempts at self-regulation or forming an industry association, or the participation rate in genuine organisations has been very low.


• The competitive nature of the industry is characterised by:


1. The product becoming a commodity,


2. Competition for customers being based on marketing and elaborate pricing and bundling schemes.


3. Companies doing almost anything - such as very expensive, manipulative and intrusive marketing campaigns - in a scramble to build market share.


• The relationship between supplier and customer is shallow, and suppliers are geared to impersonal, mass-market customer contact techniques which put the supplier's decision-makers far from consumers.


• Some or all participants regularly use marketing techniques which are intrusive and/or manipulative. This shows a pre-existing contempt for the privacy of the public, and a desire to attract new customers not on the basis of clearly communicated product/price benefits, but by persuasion and taking advantage of people's weaknesses.

 

If the industry is already running itself reasonably well, then it will not need to by forced much by government to respect consumers. Such an industry may be well positioned to change its independent self-regulatory approach into one which involves government backing and more formal responsibility to the public via the government. In that case, it could be argued that a self-regulatory or co-regulatory approach might work well, and compare quite favourably with a purely government regulation scheme.  Those industries which are a battlefield, where consumers are merely cattle to be herded and milked for all they are worth - and I am thinking of many facets of the telecommunications industry here - are the ones which are going to be most difficult to force into a worthwhile self-regulatory arrangement. They will constantly be testing the limits of the government's tolerance by creating weak codes of conduct, by having weak compliance measures and poor public accountability. In this case - an obviously troublesome industry - it is unlikely to be a good candidate for self-regulation. So the government regulation option appears more attractive.

 

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7 - Governments shirking their responsibilities to regulate

A simplistic view is: Business is good - it employs people, generates GDP, taxes, revenue for other businesses and hopefully generates exports or export replacements. Every regulation is an unproductive burden on business. So cut out the red-tape and let businesses thrive!

It makes a lot of sense, but when taken to the extent that the public, and other businesses, are exposed to exploitative practices which they cannot defend themselves from, then the government is abandoning a key commitment it made to the public - to protect the public from threats they can cannot protect themselves from.

Its my observation that the current federal government has excelled in expressing this fashion, but the previous government certainly had similar tendencies. The previous government started the privatisation of telecommunications (which is fine with me) together with the move towards industry self-regulation.

As far as I can tell, this self-regulatory move was never debated publicly or in Parliament. It was just assumed - as one does after accepting a fashion that puts rationality and other perspectives in the background. The consumer movement has never been happy about the self-regulatory approach. Many concerns about the foreseeable problems with self-regulation have been voiced over the years by representatives of Consumers Telecommunications Network (CTN) , the Australian Consumer Association and the Communications Law Centre.

The telecommunications industry is large and awash with money - most of it money from consumers paying for essential services in a monopoly or a cosy duopoly. Those in the industry, like the staff of government departments and regulators, work in large "organisations" in air-conditioned glass-walled office buildings. Its no problem for the industry to lobby government departments and political parties directly - their voice is much louder and better financed than that of consumer representatives. CTN, struggles with a staff of about three full-time workers (plus one administrator) to represent the telecommunications interests of Australian consumers. (Funding so far has come almost entirely from Telstra, despite attempts to broaden the funding base. Telstra is to be congratulated for this - but this arrangement is likely to end soon.) A handful of volunteers such as myself help out in an unpaid capacity. Given the massive complexity, growth and radical changes in telecommunications in recent years, a staff of twenty or thirty people would be required to adequately represent consumers in all the facets of telecommunications policy and in the maintenance of effective regulation.

Fortunately the government now has a policy to fund consumer representation in the telecommunications industry:

http://www.dca.gov.au/policy/section593.html

From the industry's point of view, self regulation means a bit of work and expense - to create a regulatory process they largely own and control. This is a welcome relief from having to deal with a regulator like AUSTEL, which sometimes made rulings that the carriers found most inconvenient - such as the privacy requirements for Calling Number Display.

The story of telecommunications regulation in Australia, in my six years experience, has consistently been one of consumer representatives struggling to cope with far too many issues - their voices faint by comparison with those of the industry, whose marketing and administrative divisions probably dwarfs the consumer representatives 5,000 to 1, and who similarly outnumber the voices of the regulator and no-doubt DoCA.

It is a tiring business! There have been a few wins - but there have been some terrible losses.

Its the government's responsibility to protect consumers - and the government is solely responsible for the following setbacks:

1. Last year (1997), the Federal government, without warning, cut all funding to the Consumers Federation of Australia. This modest funding was absolutely inconsequential in terms of the budget deficit, but played an important part in facilitating consumer involvement in policy development and technical standards.

 
2. This year (1998), the Privacy Commissioner's office has had its funding cut by 43%. The office, already struggling with its responsibilities in policy development and handling complaints is now even less able to protect the privacy of Australian people.

This was not a publicly debated or announced move - and could only result from a sense of negligence or hostility towards the privacy of Australians.
 

3. In its final year or two (1995-97), AUSTEL suffered greatly reduced funding - whilst taking on a wider and wider range of responsibilities. To compound matters, Telstra took AUSTEL to court over AUSTEL's finding that Telstra was the dominant participant in international phone calls. The legal expenses of defending this action further weakened AUSTEL's ability to perform its work, and requests to the government for funds to make up the short-fall were fruitless. (I learnt this first hand from an AUSTEL Board member.) An example of the resultant cut-backs were that the number of staff assigned to privacy issues was cut from two to one.

If an industry participant can successfully attenuate the regulator's ability to function, simply by taking them to court - and the government provides no relief - then it seems that the government is unconcerned about industry thwarting the regulator's attempts to do its job.
 

4. 4 - Both the previous and current governments supported a long-developed proposal to extend the scope of the Federal Privacy Act to cover not just government departments, but the activities of business as well. The current government's election policy statement supported this and so did many businesses. The Attorney General's Department had been on the case for several years, with discussion papers, plans etc. and all was proceeding smoothly.

In March 1997, apparently without consulting Cabinet, the AG's Dept. or the Privacy Commissioner, the Prime Minister announced that these plans had been abandoned - citing only the purported reason of excessive costs to business.

Reluctantly the AG's Department has fallen into line, and the Privacy Commissioner has been forced to develop a rough plan for an industry-based voluntary self-regulatory scheme to cover privacy in the commercial sphere.
 

http://www2.austlii.edu.au/itlaw/national_scheme/national-INFORMAT.html
Many businesses are opposed to this. No privacy/consumer advocate supports it. The voluntary approach is inconsistent with European regulations which will restrict information flows to countries which do not have sufficiently high standards of privacy protection.

It is impossible to reach any conclusion except that the government (or at least the government following an off-the-cuff decision by the Prime Minister) has so little interest in the privacy of Australians that it would abandon a well developed policy, with bipartisan support, without discussing it in public, with the relevant departments or even with Cabinet.
 

5. 5 - As will be detailed below, the government has allowed Telstra, Vodafone and Optus to introduce Calling Number Display on an opt-out basis without meeting the public awareness requirements which all parties agreed to in the AUSTEL Privacy Advisory Report on Calling Number Display.

Opt-out Calling Number Display is a straightforward case of the carriers wanting to sell caller's personal information, without their explicit, informed consent and very often without their knowledge.

If the government was more concerned about the privacy of Australians than the short-term profitability of the carriers, then it never would have allowed this. (Arguably, the Minister for Communications did not carry out his regulatory responsibilities on Telstra when it broke its commitment not to launch CND before the PAC public awareness requirements had been met - because he is also Minister for Maximising the Share Price of Telstra, To Keep Millions of Shareholder-Voters Happy and to Maximise Returns in the Next Phase of Privatisation.)
 

6. 6 - As will be detailed below, the process of creating some kind of regulation for outbound telemarketing began in late 1991, when AUSTEL launched its Privacy Inquiry. The end result arrived late last year. It is a completely worst-case scenario which enables telemarketers to do almost whatever they like. It is not enforceable - just a voluntary code of conduct, with no industry body to oversee it - but it has the imprimatur of the Ministerial Council on Consumer Affairs and says it is acceptable for telemarketers to call every 30 days, on any day (except three in the year) between 8 AM and 9 PM. They do not have to respect your request not to call again, and there is nothing to prohibit calls with tape-recorded messages.

I put more effort into telemarketing control than any other individual in Australia. A small part of my work is a submission to one of the committees that led to the current "code":
 

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr/tm/
All my work, and that of others, on telemarketing has been a complete waste of time.

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8 - Governments regulating inappropriately

Cryptography

The government's cryptography policy has been eagerly awaited for over a year now. Currently there are export restrictions on cryptographic software and hardware - which are completely anachronistic and no longer serve their intended national security purpose. While they are largely ignored, those companies wishing to export software and hardware - and who need to follow the letter of the law - are prevented from exporting.

Despite the suppression of the Walsh Report, there are encouraging signs that the Australian government will ignore the increasingly ridiculous requests by the USA regarding restricting the use of strong cryptography. The Australian input into the relatively enlightened OECD process may have been crucial. Hopefully these cold-war-relic restrictions will soon be historical curiosities.

Content regulation

More on this below. Attempts to impose restrictions on Internet communications are not supported by the majority of the public, are impractical and if implemented will engender disrespect for the law. The proposition that there is a single set of "community values", suitable for imposing on the entire population, in 1998's multicultural Australia, is quaint - and should be preserved for the interest of future generations.

Broadcasting - religious vilification

In February 1996, in the first test case regarding "religious vilification" the ABA found that 3RRR's "Liars Club" (a wide-ranging sceptics program) was guilty of breaching Radio Program Standards by "gratuitously vilifying the Church of Scientology". The presenter had sympathised with a victim of the so-called church, without offering a balancing viewpoint which favoured the "religion" in question.

While this regulation may have been well intentioned, its chilling effects on free discussion of questions concerning religions - and organisations which pretend to be religions - are a very serious matter. It would seem that similar logic applied to the dozens or hundreds of radio and television programs concerning abuse of children by Catholic nuns and priests would have also found many cases of so-called vilification.

Anti-discrimination legislation - or codes of conduct - can be a minefield. Vilification of individuals is a serious matter. Vilification of races probably is too - since people don't choose their race. I am not sure that vilification of systems of belief - or in the case of Scientology exploitative pseudo-spiritual brainwashing - is comparable.

This over-regulation was probably not deliberate. Perhaps the ABA made an interpretive error, but this regulation seems to need revision. I understand that the Communication Law Centre wrote a valuable critique of this decision in Issue 124 (1996) of their journal, Communication Update.

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9 - Case studies - Summary

[Note for people reading this on a text browser, or with braille or speech synthesisers:  The following two tables have five columns.  1: The area for potential regulation. 2: Whether or not it should be regulated. 3: Why, and if so how it should be regulated.  4: To what extent this regulation will be effective. 5: What should be done to achieve this, starting from the current position in Australia.]

Federal privacy regulation for companies

This is a big debate. For more information, see:

http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Privacy/Welcome.html

A primary function of government is to protect citizens from those threats which they cannot protect themselves from - those which can be effectively regulated in a centralised, systematic manner. There are many aspects of privacy, and in an increasingly complex world, the public relies on the government to stay ahead of growing number of threats to their privacy.

The abandonment of this well-developed, bipartisan supported, election promise cannot possibly be justified. The best approach is to admit the mistake and continue with the development of legislation.
 
 

Privacy in the mass media

Privacy - including "information" privacy, "intrusion" privacy (eg. violated by door-to-door salespeople and telemarketers) the privacy of personal physical space and of disclosure of personal behaviour, photos, conversations etc. - can be defined as follows:

Privacy is the autonomy with which the person controls their personal boundaries - how they manage the outflow of information, and the inflow of information, distracting and distressing communications.

A healthy life depends on these boundaries being controlled by the person, in response to their needs and desires, free of interference from outside influences. It enables them to build relationships and retain the right to peace and quiet. These needs are fundamental to humanity, and should be respected by all people.

Unfortunately, there are economic gains to be made by systematically violating people's personal boundaries.

People are at odds with other people. Most people like to have a peek (or at least a little peek) into other people's lives - and most people don't want this to happen to themselves.

The sociobiological origins of this are easy to envisage. Learning about other people's lives, thoughts, successes and failures enables a person to live more successfully. Allowing other people to find out your private thoughts, weaknesses, secret techniques etc. is likely to diminish a person's ability to live successfully.

With mass media (and potentially Internet communications) the privacy invasive demands of millions, or even billions, of people soon multiplies into a potent economic imperative for media companies to invade the privacy of anyone who is the subject of public interest. Furthermore, the media can easily generate and inflame that interest - and portray the subject of the invasive reporting as unworthy of the respect and privacy protection which any normal person has the right to expect.

Privacy invasion by the media always concerns someone who is famous (or about to be because the media chooses). A sub-set of these people are happy about being famous (for their achievements or otherwise) - as part of their work or interests they have chosen to become known to millions of people. There is a very small subset of such people who's work was thrust upon them - the Royal Family. These people did not all ask to be queens, princes and princesses - they were born into the job and for one reason or another got on with it rather than bailing out.

I don't see that it makes much difference whether a person chooses to be famous, or whether circumstances beyond their control cause this - for instance being involved in a tragedy. In general, the public has no right to force the disclosure of personal material beyond whatever personal revelations the individual freely chooses to make. The exceptions I can think of are when there is an over-riding public interest in disclosing personal details, because those details affect the public's judgement about an individual who has significant influence on them.

For instance, if certain personal behaviours or attitudes of a politician showed that they were unsuited to the trust the public placed in them, or perhaps that they were insincere about their stated policies, then it could be argued that since the politician had promised to serve the public interest, they should accept the public's right to know of evidence which challenges their bona-fides. Examples might include a Health Minister with tobacco shares, or who had a drug addiction; a proponent of socialism who hid significant share holdings, or a preacher of moral rectitude who had an unusually large number of extra-marital affairs. If the Prime Minister wants to keep private his or her passion for collecting castaway thongs, antique clocks or corsets, then he or she should be protected from media attempts to publicise such harmless and very healthy aspects of his or her life. This is a matter of the Prime Minister's personal right to privacy. It is also a matter of the public's interest in ensuring that ordinary, complex, sane people are attracted to a parliamentary career and that they remain sane and happy in the course of their demanding and corrosive work.

There is also an over-riding public interest in a court-case - where an accused must be given a fair and open trial, and the only way to do this is by publicly delving into their past. I do not think that this extends to the press digging into that past, or using photographs of the accused without their consent.

If a person comes into the public gaze, because of tragedy, heroism, romantic association with a prominent person or any other circumstance in which they did not actually choose to be famous, then what right have individuals, or the press, to invade that person's privacy with cameras, and persistent requests for interviews? None, I believe.

Even when a person chooses to make themselves famous in one way or another - and certain professions, such as acting, music making etc, make this almost compulsory for anyone who achieves success - then what right has the public or the press to expose more than what that person is willing to divulge about themselves? None.

Privacy invasion is a staple part of the mass media's stock in trade. Women - who are more biologically interested in social relations and hence gossip - play a disproportionate role in financing privacy invasive reporting. If a few million people will buy a magazine because it contains a single photograph, or revelation (no matter how false), about a prominent person - then that person faces an aggressive multi-million dollar campaign to find out almost anything they don't want to reveal. Many or most people are more interested in what an individual does not want to reveal about themselves.

A large proportion of the public is prepared to finance the systematic privacy invasion of a subset of people, including a few of themselves, who they develop an interest in. Virtually all of this cannot be justified on the grounds of genuine public interest in knowing what prominent people are trying to hide.

If any single event could cause a large number of people to re-assess their everyday privacy invasive behaviour, it is impossible to imagine any event more likely to do so than the death of Princess Diana, apparently, effectively at the hands of the paparazzi - the employees of hundreds of millions of general-public, paying, privacy-invasive clients.

Some people seem to have learnt that privacy invasion of people, including people in the public eye, is not acceptable. A large proportion of the population and most of the media seems to have learnt very little.

In the UK, I think some newspapers have promised to respect the privacy of Diana's two children. Its a start, but this is only two individuals who are off bounds for some sections of the media.

The day after her death The Age published a photo, taken through a car window, of one of her grieving sons. This paper also regularly publishes photographs, obviously also unauthorised, of grieving relatives and friends of victims of crimes, accidents and disasters. There is absolutely no educational or informational value in such photographs, which are clearly privacy invasive.

Two days after the tragedy, I saw women's' magazines still on sale in the supermarket, their covers headed "Di and Dodi Make Love for the Camera".

When the victim of this invasion is a person who chooses to be in the public eye (typically these are very generous people, not counting a few exploitative entrepreneurs), a large proportion of the population says, in effect:

"We are not satisfied with the degree to which you make yourself available to the public. We want to know more. We are prepared to pay a few dollars a pop - collectively perhaps millions of dollars - to pay people to take photos of you, and to take almost whatever action is necessary, to provide us with details of your private life. In particular we are prepared to pay for the revelation of things which you most want to keep private. Also, we aren't very fussy about the truth, so we will pay for rumour and innuendo too."

When the victim had no desire to become the focus of public attention, for instance because their family has just been killed, a large proportion of the general public says, in effect:

"We have never heard of you, but the circumstances of your upset fascinate us. We are prepared to pay for (or at least watch or read) photographs and perhaps intrusive interviews which reveal your distress to us. We may well sympathise with you, or claim to sympathise with you, but we are still prepared to pay for this privacy invasive material."

Similar things are effectively been said about people who have been charged or convicted of crimes - although there may be public interest arguments that partly or wholly justify the revelations.

The government has the hapless task of protecting individuals against these privacy invasions - because they cannot protect themselves and there are better prospects for a regulatory approach to be effective. It would be simpler if there were a small, easily identified, group of perpetrators and no other complications. While the mass-media may indeed be relatively easy to identify and control, the complication is that they are working directly to satisfy the demand of the majority of the population. Regulation would involve some kind of content control on mass-media - and hence on public debate and arguably on the processes which are essential to democracy.

These privacy invasions resemble a tribe of cannibals who feed on themselves - and who individually assert the right not to be eaten, whilst simultaneously rejecting the government's involvement in their choice of food.

I don't know what to suggest. Content regulation is extremely messy - either by legislative controls or with a code of conduct.

I think there is a place for a legislatively defined set of rights not to have details of one's personal life published in the mass media, and to provide legal backing to support people who are harassed by the media or whose pictures are published without their consent. Its not my field of expertise. Perhaps there are some regulations - but they don't seem to be working well enough.

A code-of-conduct regarding such invasive reporting might be valuable. It would probably need to be forced on the media to some extent.

The mass media is not the only problem. Increasingly there may be money to be made by the sale of privacy invasive material via the Internet. In principle this could rival the scale of the current mass-media operations - and be impossible to control effectively. This is discussed in a later section on Internet Content regulation.
 

Internet content regulation: Illegal material - ie. child-pornography

In 1996, I was an expert witness in a criminal case regarding allegedly illegal material - in the form of deleted files on a seized computer. The relevant state laws seemed to be applicable to photographic images in the form of computer files - so there should be no need for new laws regarding the placing of such material on a web-site, or communicating such files. The key elements are that the material is proved to be in the possession of the accused and that he or she intended to possess it.

In this case, the charges were withdrawn and to my knowledge the question of intent, in respect of files which were deleted and later reconstructed by Police, has not yet been tested in Australian courts.

There may be significant evidentiary problems in proving possession and intent. Files may be have been deleted to thwart investigators, the files may have been placed there by someone else (or indeed by the Police), the files may have been taken possession of without the user knowing their contents and they may have been deleted the moment the user discovered their nature. Similar questions of possession and intent arise with files found in the cache files of a user's computer - or perhaps in the cache of the ISP in a form which indicates they are there because a particular user requested them. (Cache is a temporary hard-disk storage, where a file from a remote web, FTP or gopher site is stored for a while in case it is requested again.)

Since it is a serious criminal matter, any legislative changes which weaken the requirements of proof regarding possession and intent need to be debated by the public and by technical and legal experts. Computer systems are extremely fluid and complex environments. There are situations in which files can appear in a user's directory at an ISP - for instance one of the directory which forms their web-site - for reasons other than them putting it there. It could have been placed there by the ISP staff, or more likely by another user or external hacker, who has violated the access controls on these directories. Quite a few ISPs have inadequate system security - I know of one where any user can put files and create sub-directories in many other users' web-site directories.

The nuances of proving intent to possess computer files will probably be teased out in case-law over the years. The complexities of proving intent when the files are on the defendant's own computer are non-trivial. When the files have been erased and reconstructed, or when they are on a remote computer supposedly controlled by the defendant, the difficulties are increased. Files which are merely cached raise even greater questions of intent.

Like the great majority of the population, I support criminal laws regarding the intended possession of this narrowly defined range of illegal material. There could be arguments for it becoming a Federal matter - no-doubt the differences between state laws and the cross-jurisdictional problems would hamper the prosecution in some cases.

If the case I was involved in was any guide, the Police need to be far better resourced, in terms of technical expertise with computer systems and computer usage - especially the human and technical complexities of Internet usage - before they will be able to prosecute such cases adequately.

As with the ISP interception issue discussed below, its easy for parliamentarians to pass strong and probably well-intentioned laws - but it is a waste of time if the government is not willing to fund the regulators, or the Police, so they can develop, or access, the expertise they need to enforce the laws in court.
 
 

Internet content regulation: Protecting community standards

Internet communications are completely different from mass-media technologies

It is evident from the proposals which treat some or all Internet communications in a similar fashion to printed publications, broadcasts, videos and motion pictures, come from parliamentarians who lack adequate technical understanding of the Internet. This is not surprising - the Internet is more complex and flexible than mass media technologies and the telephone. There is no excuse, however for proceeding with restrictive, and perhaps draconian, legislation on the basis of this inadequate understanding

I have spent a lot of time, without charge, assisting the staff of the Australian Broadcasting Authority (and some of their colleagues at the OFLC) in understanding Internet communications. It has been worthwhile, but there is still much more that any would-be regulator should know. I am available by phone to Committee members and staff to assist them in understanding this fascinating and vitally important network. I am also available as a consultant to conduct workshops on understanding the Internet and its characteristics which are of most interest to regulators.

The telephone system, while internally very complex, behaves in a very simple way. A phone call involves a two-way "pipe" for sound between the caller and the receiver. The telephone cannot do anything else at that time and its interface to the network is restricted to dialling numbers, getting various progress tones, having its bell rung and perhaps receiving Calling Number Display information. The telephone system is based on "circuit-switching" - the caller and receiver are connected by a bi-directional "circuit" - a "pipe" which does nothing more or less than connect them.

Radios are simple and televisions are moderately complex - but their behaviour is simple: A studio creates a signal which is broadcast via radio-waves (using relatively scarce, publicly owned spectrum) to receivers which recreate the sound and pictures. It is unidirectional and centrally controlled. The sources of content are all licensed and well known to the government. They are granted the use of radio spectrum, based on the payment of fees and/or on the basis of commitment to provide a service to the public. There are very few sources of content, compared to the listening audience and their desire for diverse content.

Films, videos, books and magazines are all easily understood. They are one-to-many technologies - but since they don't occupy radio spectrum space, they don't have to promise the government to serve the public interest. Since they are always opt-in, consensual, and highly diverse, I think the case for censorship of these forms of publication is much weaker than with broadcast radio and TV.

Pay TV, whether via satellite, microwave or HFC cable, involves an encoded analogue signal (or an encrypted digital signal) which can only be decoded by a special box - which is activated on payment of monthly or program specific fees.

The postal service involves the physical carriage of letters and parcels. Each packet has a destination address, some contents (which the Post Office is uninterested in, provided it is not a safety hazard) and typically a sender's address. The packets arrive in a sorting office, are sorted into various bags according to their destination address and are transported to further sorting offices and ultimately to the destination.

Neither the telephone nor the postal system are the subject of content regulations - except regarding malicious calls (and ideally including systematically unacceptable calls such as outbound telemarketing), and unsafe goods. There are customs checks at some national borders - but these typically only for larger and more valuable packets, and never for documents. Video-cassettes, audio cassettes, CDs and CD-ROMs too can pass straight through customs.

The Internet most closely resembles the postal system. The Internet carries packets of information - each containing between 1 and 1500 bytes (ie. characters) of information. Each packet has a destination address, and a senders address. The packet has a number to say how many data bytes it carries, and at the end it has a "CRC" - effectively a check-sum of all preceding bytes. The CRC enables the packet's integrity to be checked - if even one bit of any byte has been altered, the CRC will not agree with the modified data - and so a receiving device will know the packet contains an error.

The Internet consists of computers (AKA "Hosts") and routers (AKA "Gateways") - which are the exact equivalent of a Post Office sorting office. Millions of computers and routers are connected by a variety of bi-directional data-links. These may be fast fibre links, ordinary telephone modem calls, radio links via GSM mobile phone, satellite links etc. etc. The computers and routers are connected in ways resembling the structure of fishing nets and tree branches. Very often a user's computer is like a leaf - with a single data-link to a router, for instance via an office LAN or via a modem and a telephone call. Computers can also operate as routers - if they have two or more data links going to other machines.

A computer can create a packet, with a destination address, its own address as the sender, some data, and a "CRC" and pass it along a data-link to a router. The router probably can't send it directly to its destination, but it knows which data-link to send it to in order to reach a router which is closer to that destination. The packet passes through multiple routers - for instance about a dozen to reach a site in the USA - and is delivered to the destination computer. If the packet is corrupted, or if a router or its data-link is too busy, the packet is simply discarded. (No message goes back to the sender - this would add to the congestion.) Even if there are 25 routers to be traversed, the packet typically arrives at its destination anywhere in the world in less than half a second.

Each computer, whether permanently or temporarily connected to the Internet, has a unique numeric address. For instance the computer I am writing this on is permanently connected and has the address "202.36.57.201" There are about four billion possible addresses, and the Internet addressing system is to be upgraded to give far more. The question of how text names, like "wira.firstpr.com.au" are translated into the numeric addresses is more complex - but basically it means that the name can point to any computer in the world. It is like telling your phone to dial whatever number Robin Whittle is currently at.

Some Internet communications, such as "Internet Phone" and video conferencing protocols, use a basic "send and forget" protocol called "UDP". It is up to the software on the sending and receiving computers to sort out how to cope if some packets don't arrive. Each computer has 64,000 UDP "ports". These are not physical things - they are "logical" constructs of the software which handles the Internet traffic. A close analogy is having a stack of letterboxes at 11 Miller St, labelled "UDP 0", "UDP 1", "UDP 2" etc. up to "UDP 64,000". (Actually it is up to "UDP 65,535"). To continue the analogy, I can post a letter from any of my UDP letter boxes to any of the 64,000 UDP letterboxes at any street address in the world.

Most current Internet communications are based on a more robust protocol called "TCP". Each Internet computer has another set of 64,000 ports for sending and receiving TCP packets. TCP involves setting up a two-way session. This involves a "handshake" exchange and both computer's software being configured to support the particular session. Once it is set up, the software automatically handles lost packets - by the two computers communicating and resending those packets which did not arrive. So a reliable, two-way communication session is created. Whereas the phone network reserves a dedicated pipe in both directions, the TCP session does not involve a continual stream of data, or reserved capacity - it is simply two computer programs on two computers which know they are communicating and send extra messages to each other in order to ensure that the "payload" data arrives without errors, perhaps after a few second's delay due to retries. Data can be sent as needed - at different speeds in each direction. If more than a few percent of packets are lost, then this can lead to many re-sends - and the communication slows down enormously.

For instance my computers port "TCP 2002" could set up a session with port "TCP 80" of computer 193.4.176.111 - which is currently the address pointed to by the name "www.althingi.is". This is the web-server of the Icelandic Parliament. The packets pass through 16 routers en-route (in Melbourne, then via fibre to Bloomington Illinios, then to New York and finally to Iceland), and typically take 0.3 seconds to get there.

There is no hard limit on the number of TCP sessions which an Internet connected computer can have active at once. Each session could support a World-Wide-Web, email, FTP, voice communication, computer game etc. session - each using a different higher level protocol. Similarly there is no limit on the number of destinations and sources for the send-and-forget UDP packets.

So an Internet connected computer, including one using a dial-up ISP service, is able to set up potentially hundreds or thousands of simultaneous communication sessions with any other Internet connected computer.

Unlike the contents of envelopes which the Post Office sorts, the contents of the UDP and TCP packets are visible to the routers and computers which sort them. (These machines are generally unconcerned with the contents, except to check there are no errors.) Consequently, encryption can be used to ensure security and privacy.

While there is a "multicast" protocol, it is virtually never used, since it involves the routers in complex decisions about where to send copies of the broadcast packets. Obviously they should not be sent to every Internet connected computer in the world. References to "broadcasting over the Internet" are marketing hype - and are not to be taken literally.

There are many finer points, but the above description of the Internet is sufficient to show how much it differs from the mass-media technologies. It has a lot in common with the postal system and some things in common with the phone system. It is far more flexible than the phone system, because the user's equipment (a computer vs. a phone) is far more capable of sophisticated behaviour, and because it has a very sophisticated interface to the network - the ability to almost instantly communicate with any of tens of millions of computers.

There are fundamental technical reasons why it is impossible to place a barrier around a country, or an ISP, and reliably filter out certain kinds of material or refuse connections to particular computers. If this was attempted, there are many other methods than the most direct path to access the banned computer. Such attempts at content regulation would be only partially effective and would cause a great deal of difficulty for ordinary users.

Publishing

Quite a few Internet protocols can be used for making material generally available to the public, including FTP, HTTP (the web protocol), Gopher and the email protocols. These protocols can also be used for private communications - and email is more typically used in this way. There are any number of protocols - any programmer can invent their own. The functions they perform can be highly diverse. Email, for instance can be used to publish material - a program receives emailed requests for files, and emails the files back to the person (or program) which requested them. This takes a minute or two, rather than the second or two response of the HTTP protocol on which World Wide Web communications are based.

I assume that there is to be no content regulation on private communications. (Although NSW proposals in early 1996 would have made it a criminal offence to send an erotic love-letter via email.)

If there is to be content regulation on Internet publication, then there has to be some formal definition of what constitutes "publishing". If the legislation or code-of-conduct simply uses the word "publish", without further guidance or definition, then it will be left to the hapless ISPs and whoever else is supposed to interpret the code to determine. This will lead to overly-cautions and undesirable interpretations, or to mistakes, prosecutions, and so to a series of test cases as new situations arise which are not clearly defined as "publishing" or "private" by the code or law.

There is no straightforward, physical, way of determining whether a communication constitutes "publishing" or not - it depends on all the circumstances. Rather than expand on this here, I have prepared a page at a secret section of one of my web sites - to demonstrate that web material is not necessarily publishing:

[Actual address deleted in the public version of this submission. It contains a tutorial on the DNS system, how computers could be located anywhere, how servers can return material depending totally on which computer requested it and how email can be used for publishing and as a gateway to HTTP, FTP and Usenet. There are links to two sites. A straightforward traceroute which tells the name and IP address of the requesting computer: http://www.workweb.com/bin/traceroute.cgi A site which generates pings the user's computer (or proxy server) and generates a graphic image which shows the response and the effective bandwidth: http://vancouver-webpages.com/cgi-pub/visual-ping.html ]

Please read this page - it is effectively part of this submission.

The only people who know this address are those who read copies of the submission I send to this Committee. If I make a version of this submission available on my web site, this address will not be included. There is nothing sensitive or contentious there - and I don't mind if the Committee makes the address know to others or to the public - its just to demonstrate that the file there is on a publicly accessible web server (in my home office, not at an ISP) and anyone who knows the address of the sub-directory ([Deleted.]) can read it. Since I am only telling the Committee the address, this does not constitute publishing.

Community Standards - and the historical perspective

In the early 1950s it might have made sense to speak in terms of a single, homogenous Australian community - if we concentrate on Anglo-Celtic Australians and ignore Aborigines, the Chinese who arrived in the previous century and the influx of Italians. (I was born in 1955 and arrived here in 1962 - so I can't be sure.)

One might still talk about it now - but in a much looser way if the discussion is to be in step with the ethnic diversity and the many sub-cultures which have arisen within even Anglo-Celtic Australians in the last four decades. There are arguably certain distinguishing elements of Australian people compared, for instance, to similarly diverse countries such as Britain and the USA. We have a higher level of trust in people we don't know. We distrust government and are less supportive of censorship. We are less concerned about class, religion and in many respects, race. There's a lot to be said for this!

But this does not mean that there is a cohesive set of "community standards" which can reasonably applied in a compulsory way to all Internet communications in this country. I am fully supportive of maintaining all but the most oppressive cultures, lifestyles and sub-cultures. So are many other Australians. No doubt there will still be rockers in 2054, punks in 2076 and hopefully a handful of swagmen in 2101.

The historical perspective is very clear. For fifty years there has been a continual trend towards plurality, tolerance and indeed celebration of diversity. Did Australian society degenerate into a ribald orgy of decadent abandon because the ABC screened the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi-Gras? Not that I have noticed. Some of these developments are both shocking and welcome. Many veterans of WWII might would have disbelieved that the Australia they were defending would within decades host homosexual and S&M parades in Sydney. However it is good for business, attracts tourists and it would have been welcomed by those fighting men who were themselves homosexual.

Internet communications are not like anything else - except perhaps the postal system. It is a democratic, decentralised, cost-effective, extraordinarily flexible and elegant global network. It facilitates all sorts of communications, including the most personal and stimulating. The Internet signals the end of a century dominated (except for the telephone) by communication technologies which are one-to-many, centrally controlled and uni-directional.

Since:

1. Every country needs the Internet for economic reasons (North Korea is the last to pretend otherwise).
2. An economically useful Internet service cannot be censored reliably, in terms of political or any other content.
3. Dictatorships and repressive regimes cannot survive in an environment of free communication.

It follows that the Internet will catalyse the demise of the many dictatorships and repressive regimes. I believe this will take place over the next ten to fifteen years. With luck, and barring environmental catastrophe and rogues with nuclear weapons, these dictatorships and oppressive regimes will be replaced with virtually no loss of life. I am thinking of China, Indonesia, many smaller countries - and I am thinking of the demise of the grip the mass media has on public debate in democracies such as our own.

Mankind has been suffering under the yoke of its own leaders since before civilisation began. More people have probably been killed by their own governments than by criminals or foreign soldiers. (A senior official at DoCA told me this with certainty.) Perhaps only infectious disease has been a worse scourge than corrupt, oppressive governments.

The Internet promises to facilitate the clean up of most of the oppressive regimes, with little bloodshed, in a few decades! Thats a major human achievement - and quite an extraordinary one for a computer networking protocol.

So in 1998, some Australian governments are still planning to censor Internet communications for the purposes of protecting "community standards".

Four decades after Kerouac, Presley and the first stirrings of mass youth and alternative culture.

Three decades after the Beatles, Hendrix, Woodstock and an explosion of perspectives and lifestyles which challenged the prevailing, and somewhat illusory notion that mainstream society had all the answers. The decade in which native Australian's were officially recognised as citizens.

Two decades after the mainstream cultures really started to diversify and incorporate elements of the counter-culture, and in which the last major war ended and Asian immigration began.

One decade after computerisation and automation transformed many jobs and homes and in which Australia's isolation ended and we recognised we had to compete with all other countries - and especially the Tigers to the north.

At the end of the decade in which everyone and his dog got a mobile phone and the Internet finally provided a personal, global, means of social exchange, discussion, research and commerce. In which Internet censorship attempts in the USA were ruled unconstitutional, and only Singapore, amongst the developed countries maintained a pretence of serious Internet censorship. (Actually the Singapore system is a sham - there is an unfiltered government proxy server and lots of people, including those in government, use it to get their naughty pictures. Source: a friend who works for an ISP there.)

Reliable content regulation of Internet communications is essentially impossible - even within one country. In most respects thats fine - but in some, as discussed below, it is extremely unfortunate.

Except for material which is illegal to possess and as discussed in the sections below, (contempt of court, privacy etc.) which concern matters well outside the scope of the proposed "community standards" content regulation, uncensored Internet communications is not going to cause Australian society to catch fire or mutate into something unpleasant. It won't be smooth sailing for everyone, but it is the next step in the diversification of society into a multi-threaded patchwork, in which individuals are empowered by communication unrestricted by censorship and the narrowing demands of mass-media. This person-to-person and group-based communication, between birds-of-a-feather, enables people to be their real selves and to grow - beyond the limitations of their local community and government.

Its an historic change - that puts humanity in touch with itself, with all its diversity and enthusiasm intact - without the interference of the editing and commercial or government agendas which so affect the mass media.

Its also a time for parliamentarians to engage with their constituencies in long-term, constructive group discussions, without the time pressures and restrictions of venomous journalists. (There's no Paul Lineham biting at your web-site or email correspondence!)

I am not concerned that the current content regulation proposals will be implemented. As the government comes closer to actually framing laws or codes, it will face the task of making the publication vs. private communication distinctions explicit in a way that can be reliably understood by ISPs and the public, and in a way which is meaningful to the courts. It could take a few more years, but you will eventually discover that the publication vs. private communications distinction is so problematic that the whole thing is much more complicated than you currently envisage. By then, most people will have direct Internet experience and won't be so influenced by the disgraceful scaremongering of Time Magazine, and local commercial print and TV news organisations.

(Of course the Australian government could just dash off some ill-considered laws, as the Clinton Administration did, and retreat to watch the fireworks when they are tested in court.)

Reliable Internet content regulation in a country is an impossible task (for better and for worse). It is also a rather pointless goal, because Internet communications are inherently global, and any Australian who was troubled by the restrictions would simply move their web-site off shore, encrypt all their email - and their hard-disk if they worried about a police raid.

As with any change, Internet communications will bring some losses of simplicity and of previously held values. Its corrosive effects will be minuscule compared to the ravages of those stalwarts of the culture of past generations - war, oppressive sex roles, denial of sexual diversity in ordinary people, tobacco addiction and alcoholism. Internet communications is facilitating an explosion in personal adventure and freedoms, as was facilitated by the motor car, but without the pollution, resource usage or safety problems.

A substantial poll of Australian Internet users shows that only 8% believe Internet communications should be subject to censorship. The EFA press release is worth quoting in full:

Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc. 

                    Media Release                  January 1st 1998


POLL SHOWS AUSTRALIANS DON'T WANT INTERNET CENSORSHIP

Results from the latest www.consult survey (10500 Australian Internet
Users, November 1997) show continuing opposition to censorship of the
Internet.  They come just a month after Australian Attorneys-General
promised tough Internet censorship - and in the same week as China
announces sweeping new Internet censorship regulations.

Fewer than 8% of Australian Internet users believe there should be
government censorship of the Internet.  60% think that parents alone
should take responsibility.  And 30% don't think that anyone should
censor the Net.

www.consult principal Ramin Marzbani asked: "Why are significant
government resources and attention being wasted on trying to conjure up
near impossible and unnecessary ways to censor the Internet?  Worse still,
many of the government efforts appear directed at pushing the cost of
enforcement onto third parties such as ISPs who can not reasonably be
expected to police and monitor their users."

Electronic Frontiers Australia chairman Kim Heitman commented: "Survey
results like this have been repeated many times now.  They make it very
clear that the Australian Attorneys-General are out of step with public
opinion in their plans to censor the Internet.  EFA has pointed out before
that the ultra-conservative Lyons Forum, which seems to have control of
Coalition social policy, represents only a small minority of Australians."

"Child pornography is already illegal on the Internet, and Australians
do not accept that further censorship is necessary or desirable."

2500 people have signed EFA's online petition against Internet censorship.

ENDS

      --------------------------------------------------------------
      Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc  --  http://www.efa.org.au/
      representing Internet users concerned with on-line freedoms
      --------------------------------------------------------------

The government does not impose content regulation on telephone conversations, on the contents of letters or on private conversations. Internet communications are at least as intimate, personal, opt-in and point-to-point as these more traditional modes of communication - which are recognised as being private and so are protected from unauthorised monitoring and from content regulation.

As this submission shows, there are quite a few telecommunications regulatory issues, which would provide real, tangible benefits for almost all Australians, languishing because of lack of government interest. To ignore these issues - CND, telemarketing, Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace - and continue flogging the dead horse of censorship that the informed public clearly does not want, would be at odds with the government's duty to the public.

As a footnote, the ABA's work on content regulation - which is widely respected here and overseas (there are criticisms too, but it is a difficult field) - was done by two (and now three) full time people, with limited assistance from other ABA and OFLC staff, without proper funding. The government has not provided the ABA with additional funding for the Online Services work, which began in late 1995. A funding proposal has been made for the next financial year, but this is nearly three years late. Until six months ago, they were so short of resources that they did not even have a printer connected to their Internet computer. The Online Services work has involved overseas travel, hosting meetings and seminars in Sydney and consulting widely with users, ISPs, content creators, software companies and regulators here and overseas.

Again we see the pattern that the government is averse to supporting its own regulatory agencies - in this case an agency which has done a great deal of work to assist government understanding of Internet communications. Meanwhile the government talks tough about regulations which no-one really wants and which will have cause immense costs and difficulties if they are ever implemented.

Internet content regulation: Protecting children

In principle, sophisticated labelling of all or a substantial amount of potentially child-suitable material (ie. of interest to people up to about 16 or 18 years old, including for HSC project research) would facilitate leaving children unattended with an Internet connected computer. The filtering would block all access to material which did not have labels in the material, or which did not have labels generated by one of potentially many labelling organisations. There is no need to enforce labelling on all web content.

Unfortunately it is difficult to devise a set of values which can cope with the vast range of material, in a way which reflects the likely concerns of parents and teachers in a wide range of cultures and with a range of child ages and sensibilities in mind. A suitably sophisticated scheme might be impossibly complex to generate labels for, and impossibly complex for teachers and parents to program filter settings for. This is a damn nuisance - because the original W3C PICS protocol supports such sophisticated labelling - with the labels both built into the web documents and generated by one of more independent label-servers anywhere in the world.

The EFA has worked with the Global Internet Liberty Campaign against the W3C's "PICSRules 1.1" which applies and extends PICS in ways which are different from the original intention of empowering end-users - or their responsible adult.

From the submission at:

http://www.gilc.org/speech/ratings/gilc-pics-submission.html

PICSRules 1.1 go far beyond the original objective of 
PICS to empower Internet users to control what they and 
those under their care access. They further facilitate 
the implementation of server / proxy-based filtering thus 
providing a more simplified means of enabling upstream 
censorship, beyond the control of the end user.

For several years, companies have sold filtering programs to parents, schools - and now the Chinese government - which block access to a large number of web sites and sections of web-sites. These programs, such as CyberPatrol and Net Nanny, have been the subject of intense debate since it has been shown that they block not just material which is unsuitable for children, but sites which are arguably suitable but which reflect non-mainstream viewpoints. These "block lists" are regularly updated, and their contents are under the company's control. The lists typically block sites which are critical of the company . . . Its a debate I have not followed in detail - but the picture is clear: these filtering programs cannot, or do not, provide purely the filtering a responsible adult might want - they introduce other biases and restrictions into the child's Internet experience.

Probably the best existing PICS based labelling system is "Safe Surf". The problems with the more popular RSACi, with filtering programs and with PICSRules 1.1 are documented at the EFA's site:

http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/cens2.html

Internet content regulation: Contempt of court

Contempt of court, by the dissemination of information likely to be prejudicial to a trial, is an extremely serious matter. Controls are almost always respected and enforceable in mass media of the country concerned. The mass media is centrally controlled and generally professionally run in this respect.

The Internet makes it very easy for anyone who wants to disseminate information to do so with impunity. Anonymous posts to Usenet newsgroups are probably the simplest approach to placing information in the public domain and making it a matter of archival record. Alternatively the material could be put on a web-server located in a foreign country.

There was a case in Canada, a few years ago, involving a complex murder case which held the nation enthralled. The government found it was powerless, legally and physically, to stop someone making material which was deemed highly prejudicial to the trial, available on a number of web sites.

The same could happen here, and the influence of this mode of making information public will grow as more and more people gain Internet connectivity. I estimate that more than half the population will have direct or easy (via a friend or partner) Internet access by the year 2000. Considering the popular fascination with contentious court cases, this is fertile ground for spreading material which would be judged in contempt of court. (Imagine the Lindy Chamberlain trials in a world of ubiquitous Internet connectivity!)

Unfortunately there is absolutely no bulletproof way of preventing this, with all the legal and technical muscle in the world. Governments have to accept they can no longer control what their populations read and discuss in public.

I don't think a code of conduct will be much use here - it is not an industry we are trying to regulate. I have not considered this issue in depth, but I think that the criminal provisions for contempt of court, if they are not already technologically neutral enough to encompass Internet modes of communication, should be extended. However, it could be a minefield trying to prove both intent and that the person actually caused the dissemination of the information.

Say person A wrote an email to person B, fully intending it to be private, giving them some view, information or mis-information which would be in contempt of court if published. There's no problem whatsoever. Then B, deliberately or otherwise, thinks - "Hey that's interesting, I'll post it to the widely read Usenet newsgroup aus.general!" Within hours, thousands of people have read it and the word spreads. Although a single TV program or magazine article can establish false beliefs in millions of minds, the Internet is probably the ultimate bullshit and gossip amplifier. Soon people will have repeated the information in other forms, probably with their own elaborations, in a variety of other discussion fora, including the original newsgroup. Within a day this could be reported in the mass media and be the subject of Police investigation. People inside and outside Australia, who have no sympathy for Internet censorship, or perhaps have a view about the trial, then archive the text on multiple web sites the world over, and register it in search engines so anyone can easily find it . . . . It is a nightmare.

If person B - the one who really made the information public (quite likely in ignorance of the implications of their actions) was located in another country, then legally there is nothing that could be done.

If someone wanted to frame someone else, it would be relatively easy to falsify email in a way that looks like it came from the appropriate person. A person may be able to defend themselves by careful analysis of their own computer usage, and of the forged email. Conversely a person who really did send an email (or made a newsgroup posting) which publicised the information could attempt to deny it by accidentally erasing their hard disk, and claiming they were being framed. The prosecution would have a tough time proving the case beyond reasonable doubt.

As with many of the problems raised by the age of extreme information fluidity we are now entering for ever more, the best answer lies not in the previously effective methods of brute-force prevention - but in education and trying to raise general levels of responsibility and awareness.
 

Internet content regulation: Defamation and disclosure of private material

Defamation can be disastrous as well for the victim - but at least defamatory material can be removed, and a retraction or apology put in its place and widely publicised.

Disclosure of private material - say secret camera photos of a person, naked or otherwise, male or female, old or young, famous or unknown - can have a devastating effect on an individual and perhaps their family and career. For instance explicit photos of a young actress might be made public on a newsgroup or an overseas web site. Nothing could stop the rot from then on - other than a reasonable intelligent and sensitive population. Its abundantly clear, after the death of Princess Diana, and the global publication and purchase of hidden camera photos of her in a gym, that the general population is anything but intelligent and sensitive. That will never change.

As for the question of contempt of court, there is no bulletproof technical or legal remedy for these bad aspects of the age of extreme information fluidity.

Defamation is a very slippery business - I don't know much about its legal parameters. Privacy invasive photographs are a potentially a shocking problem. The only examples I have seen were Japanese personal web sites with "up-skirt" photos taken with concealed cameras. I can't easily find one now.

Like contempt of court, the worst-case abuses are potentially horrendous. It does not follow, however, that such occurrences will be very common - or that drastic regulatory action is warranted. Maybe it is just early days, like a year ago before the SPAM epidemic really began. Perhaps as social standards (or whatever is left of them when most of the population has spent a decade or two watching commercial TV) change, decay or evolve (depending on your perspective) privacy invasive photos will become more common.

Again, there's no bulletproof solution. Dissemination or publication - and arguably the possession of - privacy invasive photographs, private email, tape recordings and the like is a serious assault on the person. It should be made illegal in Internet communications if it is not already. Such regulations, which are in tune with most people's accepted standards of privacy protection, make a point - but will be rarely enforced. Whatever the best solution is, I expect it will lie largely in education and maintaining high standards by example and persuasion.

The ability of a generally high respect for personal privacy makes any dissemination of such private material less likely in any situation in which the perpetrator may be identified. I imagine there are plenty of ISPs who are quite happy about hosting explicit erotica concerning consenting adults - but privacy invasive pictures would be another story. On the other hand, The Age published one of the Diana photos, and millions of people the world over looked at and probably paid for them too.
 

Internet content regulation: Copyright

Prohibiting the dissemination or publication of copyright material is a form of content control. As this form of content control does not raise freedom-of-speech issues, and since it is intended to protect the legitimate owners of intellectual property, it is less likely to be opposed by the public.

Still, all the laws in the world won't, on their own, stop people copying things for a low cost if the only alternative is to pay a very high cost for the legitimate product - especially when they know that little of their money goes to the artist and song-writer.

I think there does need to be copyright laws covering Internet communication - and I understand they are in place or being developed. That won't solve the problem of people disrespecting intellectual property.

Fortunately, with CD-Rs and high-speed Internet, it will soon be feasible to buy music directly over the network - directly from the artist - for less than the price of a CD. My paper, "Music Marketing in the Age of Electronic Delivery":

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr/musicmar/

Draconian laws regarding copyright are not feasible to enforce on end-users. A code-of-conduct doesn't seem to be relevant. Straightforward civil laws regarding unauthorised copying of intellectual property should also cover copying via the Internet - but they probably won't be used very often.
 

ISPs and the TIO

Firstly, it is my impression that many or most ISPs go to a lot of trouble to support their users. Along with price and the technical quality of the Internet connectivity - the efficiency of the help-desk is a major determinant of the worth of an ISP for many people. Most ISPs are relatively small - so the long feedback paths which bedevil larger organisations are not a problem. On the other hand, there is a lack of technical expertise at some ISPs, so it could be quite a patchwork.

The specific problems I am aware of concern a relatively large ISP, which I believe is technically and in a business sense, very well run. Like most other ISPs, they have been expanding and making no real profits since their inception. They joined the TIO quickly and generally have good relationships with the TIO staff.

The problem is the complaints! The TIO bills the ISP for complaints from their customers - and the charges can mount very rapidly if the dispute is not resolved quickly. These costs are a serious matter to any ISP, including this one which is relatively large. I have been told that spurious complaints can cost the company in excess of a thousand dollars if they are not resolved quickly.

Some of the problem complaints come from customers and others from people who are not even customers of the ISP. The TIO charges the ISP nonetheless. It also charges for complaints from customers who have not first raised the problem with the ISP.

The nature of some of the complaints are completely spurious and unresolvable to the customer's satisfaction. The common theme seem to be grossly incompetent customers having all sorts of difficulties with their computer - and blaming the ISP - or sometimes completely unreasonable people, who may or may not be customers.

I cannot detail this further - it is not my direct experience or my company. I am not sure what the solution is - but I hope you hear from them. Like any ISP, they are desperately busy building their network and looking after customers, and the idea of making a submission to a Senate Committee may not seem to be the most productive task at hand.
 

ISPs and Interception

The new legislation is mentioned in: http://www.dca.gov.au/policy/future.html

It is the "Telecommunications (Interception) and Listening Device Amendment Bill 1997" which is not currently available on the Net, and with Royal Assent on 16 December 1997 is now the "Telecommunications Legislation Amendment Act 1997".

The Act means that ISPs will need to provide the technical facilities suitable for interception of their customer's communication - and the real-time carriage of that traffic to the facilities of the relevant law enforcement agency. This would involve some expense and trouble - I don't know how much - and would be recoverable by the agency paying a fee in the event that the interception facility was in fact required.

This legislation, I understand, was developed with little or no consultation with ISPs. There is no guarantee that their up-front expenses will ever be repaid by the Police requiring an interception.

It is my impression, based an indirect information, that the Federal Police have neither the expertise nor the resources to deal with the two streams of packets which constitute the Internet communications of a customer. Criminals are highly likely to be using freely available encryption software so that no law enforcement agency can decipher the messages (with available computers in less than a few million years).

This is not a complete analysis, but my impression is that the government has forged ahead with regulations which add significant costs to all ISPs, without adequate consultation, without first ensuring that the Federal Police are resourced to make use of this form of interception and without a full debate as to whether the extension to include ISPs is likely to aid the fight against serious crime to a degree that justifies the costs imposed on ISPs and therefore the public.
 

Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace

There is another form - Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace - which can be activated instantly by any customer (or those who have asked for the service to be available to them) the moment they receive a malicious call.

This is a technical capability of modern telephone exchanges - and I had been expecting it to be introduced as a matter of course as Telstra proceeded with the "Future Mode of Operation" (FMO) upgrade of its main telephone network. Nothing happened. Despite my attempts, Malicious Call Trace has never been seriously considered by AUSTEL - even by its Privacy Inquiry or by the Privacy Advisory Committee.

It is plainly ridiculous that Australian people are completely exposed to one-off malicious calls, despite having poured billions and billions of dollars into Telstra's coffers over the years. The (FMO) was financed with a small proportion of the massive fees the public paid to Telstra - the company the public wholly owned - and yet CAMCT never seemed to be of interest to the company.

If Telstra was genuinely interested in the privacy of its customers, then the minimal cost of implementing and managing CAMCT would have been a minor issue and the company would have proceeded to introduce it several years ago as it upgraded the menagerie of older exchanges to the big, new, centralised digital exchanges. CAMCT is purely a matter of exchange software. I have not been able to find out exactly what capabilities Telstra's Alcatel and Ericsson exchanges have - but it is clear that CAMCT is either a basic part of their operating system or the sort of option which can easily be added with a software update.

Telstra faces substantial internal costs from the messy business of initial investigation of malicious calls. The more serious work is done by the Police - the federal Police I think - but I heard that they are none-too-keen about it due to lack of funding.

CAMCT, would be an excellent deterrent against all malicious calls. Therefore the incidence of such calls would be reduced dramatically. In addition, those callers who did persist would have their activities traced much more rapidly and efficiently than with the current clunky arrangements if CAMCT was available. The result, I believe, would probably be an overall reduction in Telstra's costs.

Another angle is that the carriers are (or at least were in the last Telco Act) required to do what they could to prevent their networks being used to commit crimes. A malicious call - one that is threatening, harassing, or in all the circumstances, offensive - is a criminal matter with a penalty of up to one year in gaol. Malicious calls are a source of immense distress - particularly amongst women. Telstra and the other carriers could implement CAMCT, and it could be argued that they must, since it constitutes and effective means of preventing their networks being used to commit crimes.

Late in 1996, I spent a week or so researching CAMCT in other countries. At the time, quite a number of people were interested in improving the Malicious Call Trace situation - including people from AUSTEL, the TIO and the Commonwealth Ombudsman's office. Part of the interest in Malicious Call Trace stemmed from a 1995 British TV documentary ("Telephone Terror") which showed that British Telecom had no proper instantly activateable Malicious Call Trace service and consequently had a huge problem with malicious calls. BT had 150 staff

using the most primitive techniques, with little success against an estimated 15 million malicious calls per year.

However nothing ever eventuated. The results are at:

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr/mct/

Malicious Call Trace has nothing technically to do with Calling Number Display. The victim never gets the caller's number - that number is passed from the phone company directly to the Police.

In early 1997 I wrote to Telstra to ask them their position - and eventually received a letter which basically said it was all too hard.

This is a scandalous disregard for the privacy of customers and for law enforcement. I am past trying to push this any further - after the debacles with Calling Number Display and telemarketing - but I will assist anyone who wants to make some progress on this matter.

I believe that Telstra's reluctance to introduce CAMCT is very short-sighted. The benefit it would gain in terms of increased public-esteem by actually doing something to protect privacy - would probably be worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year in extra revenue. This is because telephony is a generic product with similar prices - and people choose the company they feel happiest about. The other source of reluctance was no-doubt Telstra's equally short-sighed and disrespectful plan to introduce Calling Number Display on an opt-out basis. People are initially attracted to CND in the belief that it will be useful in detecting or deterring malicious calls. This is illusory, but I feel certain that Telstra wanted to maximise the demand for CND by refusing to offer the best form of Malicious Call Trace.

Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace - similar to that supplied by many US phone companies - should be made a feature of the Standard Telephone Service and so be supplied by all Australian carriers - on fixed line phones, ISDN connections and digital mobiles.

It is plainly ridiculous when we pay so much for our phone calls, and so much in taxes to the government and neither the carriers nor the government (or the past one for that matter) seems interested in taking the most obvious steps to enforce the law, and protect people from the curse of malicious calls.

These calls are not enquiries to see if your fridge is running. They are people telling women that they will never see their husband again. Malicious calls include bomb threats - which any child can make and which are immensely disruptive and expensive to respond to. The ABC TV studios in Melbourne received two bomb threats which completely disrupted their Saturday morning live broadcast of the national music program Recovery. Enquiries to Telstra in both cases were met with the response that there wasn't anything Telstra could do.

This lack of CAMCT - and the CND debacle - is symptomatic of the culpable lack of management and respect for the public by the carriers, the regulator and the governments of the day.
 

Calling Number Display

The Minister wrote to them telling them they must meet these requirements - but has done nothing whatsoever to back this up.

A proper account of all the issues at stake with CND would be at least as long as this submission. Please refer to my web site material on CND:

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr/cnd/

http://demos.anu.edu.au:7007/cgi-bin/pastimepub/article.pl?dir=years/1997/dec/2/hansard/sen&art=356

The PAC CND report itself was a serious compromise. In reality there is no justification whatsoever for introducing Calling Number Display on an opt-out basis. It should be opt-in or not at all. No-one has ever justified why people should have their phone service re-configured, without their consent and very often without their knowledge, so that the phone company can sell their number to the people the call.

While it is true that a phone system designed today would probably incorporate opt-out CND as standard, this would not raise too many problems. All people who began to use the phone would know about it - provided all phones had a CND display - which they would. Therefore all users would understand that their number was ordinarily sent - and would know how to stop it being sent. The problem with introducing CND on an opt-out basis now is that many people simply don't know it is happening, and don't understand how to control it, or what the privacy implications are. For instance most people don't understand what a reverse directory is (a CD-ROM which contains the White Pages data and can turn a phone number into a name and address.)

Telstra was never serious about public education. The government showed only the pretence of being interested in protecting the privacy of the people it serves.

I have been involved in this debate since early 1992, and have written and analysed it extensively. Only a fraction of this work is on my web site. This work has cost me dearly in months of lost productive time. In the end, other than our victory in having silent line customers opt-in, and in having it names Calling Number Display, rather than "Caller ID" we lost entirely.

This is entirely attributable to the combined power of the short-sighted phone companies and government - neither of which could care less about the privacy of Australians - simply doing what they like while an under-resourced and minuscule consumer advocacy movement, and at last a moderately interested press, do our best to fight this and many other privacy battles.

It is an utter disgrace. The responsibility lies ultimately with the government.

To retrieve this situation - to protect people's privacy and restore trust in the government's bona-fides, the Minister should follow up on his letter to the carriers and instruct them to turn CND off - or make it opt-in - until each company has provably achieved the PAC requirements for public awareness in its population of callers. (This calls for an awareness/understanding of what CND is, how it can affect privacy, and how to control the display of the number on a per call and per-line basis. This awareness/understanding must be attained by 80% of the population and by 80% of six groups with special needs - such as people from non-English speaking backgrounds.)
 
 

Outbound telemarketing

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr/tm/

Everyone knows that the vast majority of the population hate getting outbound telemarketing calls - and that there is absolutely nothing we can do to defend ourselves. Perhaps as parliamentarians, presumably with unlisted numbers, you are generally spared this assault on your attention. It is really bad, stopping what you are doing to answer the phone - expecting a friend, or a business call - only to have your time wasted and be drawn into an unpleasant conversation with someone who is being paid to manipulate you, for instance to make you feel guilty about not supporting some "charity" or about not being interested in installing a safety switch to protect your family . . . Then you put the phone down (I generally give them a piece of my mind and convince them they should be ashamed of themselves, wishing them luck in getting a better job) and you realise nothing has been achieved. Most of them have no system for not calling you again. The next time a telemarketers computer dial's your number, again, you will drop what you are doing, answer politely to go through the entire thing again - with a different person - and again nothing will be achieved. There is no personal defence. This will continue, millions of times a month, in homes and especially businesses all around Australia, until the government takes its responsibilities seriously and outlaws the bastards! Its not such a hard problem.

It is not a good form of employment. I can't imagine a worthwhile job for which outbound telemarketing constitutes good training. It is utterly soul-destroying work.

The party that promises to outlaw telemarketing will have an enormous advantage in the next election!

As detailed in:

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr/tm/accc1.htm

Outbound telemarketing is more than a massive waste of time and an intrusion into virtually every home - it is a cost to businesses whose staff must spend time and emotional energy fending off the calls as well.

Outbound telemarketing is a corrosive social influence. It causes people to decrease their trust in people they don't know. This may not be an issue if there is just one or maybe two calls a year. Consider how it would be if each home received three or more calls per-day. This happens in quite a few homes in the USA and it could happen here unless something is done. (My brother in Phoenix, Arizona was getting three or so calls a day at their home. The incidence reduced after their number was made ex-directory, as are more than half the numbers in California.) That level of continual privacy invasion - day after day - with no defence and no warning, at any time of the day, is bound to cause stress, hatred and anxiety. Do that to an entire population, year after year, and it will drive them insane to a significant degree.

Outbound telemarketing is of no benefit whatsoever to consumers or businesses who are targeted. It never provides any advantage compared to other less intrusive forms of marketing. The only reason it persists is that it is successful at getting a small percentage of people to part with their money - typically without having full information about the product or "charity" and without spending time to think about the alternatives. Its success is attributable to people's weakness and vulnerability to manipulation.

It is a grossly inefficient, disrespectful and destructive form of fund-raising. Firstly there are immense labour and call costs to be paid. Most calls which are apparently from charities are actually from companies licensing the charities name - and paying just a few percent of the "donations" to the charity concerned. (This matter of bogus and non-100% charity fund-raising is outside the telecommunications field, but something that needs to be worked on.)

Outbound telemarketing could get far worse in Australia. The 25 cent cost of local calls has been a welcome barrier so far - but many local calls made by telemarketers are at 18 cents a call (timed - which adds cost if the call is longer than a few minutes) via Telstra's ISDN phone service. The cost could go lower and telemarketers can now bargain with Telstra, Optus and service providers to get the cheapest rates.

Another threat is the use of recorded messages. This has already occurred to a limited extent. My brother (in Melbourne), two years ago, answered the phone to find a recorded promotional message from a commercial radio station. The AUSTEL Privacy Inquiry pointed out that some controls will almost certainly be required to prevent people being exposed to this menace - but nothing has been done.

Here is what should happen with outbound telemarketing. There is no place for a code-of-conduct - there is not really an identifiable industry, it is just a pernicious business practice. Outbound telemarketing is a systematic abuse of people's privacy and misuse of the telephone service. The fair trading aspects of telemarketing are a totally separate issue to the privacy and unacceptable telecommunications issues.

There needs to be legislation, which covers both telemarketing sales and funds-raising calls, from individuals, companies and charities, to anyone (individuals, companies or whatever). This is distinct from market research survey calls - which often have some benefits for society and which are accepted by a much higher proportion of the population. (Better still, a more generalised regulation regarding systematically unacceptable use of the telephone network would be a better approach. I discussed this in detail with the AUSTEL Privacy Inquiry and will be happy to discuss it with anyone who is interested.)

Ideally telemarketing calls would be only made to those people who had previously indicated that they are interested in receiving them. As a compromise, an alternative approach is to have a list of phone numbers (no names, addresses etc.) which indicates which numbers should not be called by telemarketers. Telephone users would need to renew their request every two years or so - in another compromise to the telemarketers (who don't deserve any respect or compromises) so that they are not locked out from a number forever without conscious action on the part of the people concerned. When the phone number is relinquished by a user, it would drop off the list.

That list of numbers would be regularly updated and distributed to telemarketers - at their expense. It is easy to do via the Internet, and the entire list (actually a list of bits, one for each phone number) would fit on one or two floppy disks anyway. Telemarketers almost always use computer software and CD-ROM directories to call the numbers, so it is a simple matter of software to check the number against the opt-out list to prevent it being called.

This "list" of numbers only needs to be a single "flag" or "bit" for each possible number. If the "flag" is set to 0, then no preference has been expressed for that number. If it is "1", then the person whose number it is has requested no telemarketing calls.

All this is detailed in: http://www.ozemail.com.au/~firstpr/tm/accc1.htm which was part of my submission to the ACCC process which lead to the current situation. This also discusses why telemarketing should be regulated completely separately from market research calls.

This "bit" or "flag" should ideally be kept as part of the Integrated Public Number Database - the central database of all Australian telephone numbers currently under development by the ACIF. I understand that the Consumer Telecommunications Network rep on the relevant committee (Sarah Bridge) suggested that this flag be added to the database and that she received a very negative reception. This typifies the departmentalism, the narrow vision, the corporate dogma and the hostility to consumer benefit which is so often encountered by the few people who represent consumers' telecommunications interests in Australia.

People who's numbers were on that list would report incidences of telemarketing calls. Ideally they would use Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace to positively identify the source of the call. (CAMCT provides the number only to law enforcement agencies - or in this case telemarketing / unacceptable call investigators). Persons, companies or charities who are found to be systematically making telemarketing calls to numbers on the opt-out list would be fined, and/or (with a change to the telco act) refused connection to the telephone network.

The list should either cover mobile phones as well, or telemarketing calls to mobiles should be completely prohibited. The latter makes a lot of sense, particularly since the telemarketers has no idea where the phone is located and therefore does not know what time of the day or night they are disturbing the person they are targeting.

This is all perfectly feasible, non-draconian, and a perfect example of how the government can relatively easily protect the entire population from these attacks on their privacy and ultimately their sanity - where there is no personal defence at all.

If nothing is done, telemarketing could grow to be a monstrous scourge on the Australian population. Our most unique and prized national asset - our generally easy-going, trusting, nature - is directly threatened by high levels of outbound telemarketing. A little thought would show that this asset has major economic implications in terms of tourism and demand for our exports, especially our cultural exports and services. The damage which high levels of telemarketing can do translates into millions or billions of dollars in these economic terms - and that alone should motivate governments to take some action. However it should not be necessary to invoke such economics. The government's responsibility to protect the public should be more than sufficient reason for action - and its is pathetic that the government needs to be reminded.

After the AUSTEL Privacy Inquiry, for several years, nothing happened on telemarketing. The AUSTEL Privacy Advisory Committee produced a report on telemarketing but it was virtually useless. Neither the consumer rep or the Privacy Commissioner's representative were on that PAC sub-committee. I provided some input and offered to help out - but nothing happened.

In 1996, the ACCC and the Ministerial Council on Consumer Affairs eventually got to "own" the telemarketing problem. It was classed as a form of direct marketing - which it is, if the receiver of the call actually goes ahead and makes a purchase or a donation. That should be a separate issue and the intrusion problem of telemarketing should be handled by federal telecommunications-specific legislation.

The November 1997 code, which emerged after a long process that I contributed to (see my web site) and ultimately lost track of, is an absolute worst-case result.

It is a "model" code - as if it was to be enforced by an industry body - but there is no industry body. The government has made this code, perhaps with industry involvement, and so gives blessing to its contents. The printed document is called "Direct Marketing Code of Practice - A model code endorsed by the Ministerial Council on Consumer Affairs". The code is available in printed form the ACCC or DIST.

The code is available in zipped Word 6 and zipped RTF formats at:

http://www.accc.gov.au/contact/dirmarke.htm

• There is no provision for a national opt-out list.
• There is no mention of telemarketers noting the numbers of people who request never to be called again.
• Telemarketers can call 8AM to 9PM (at the consumer's local time) any day except Christmas Day, Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
• There seems to be no mention of the problems faced by businesses targeted by telemarketers.
• There is no restriction on using recorded messages, or the equally confusing and annoying "predictive dialling systems" which keep the operators working flat-out by dialling more numbers than they can handle, on the basis that on average, not all calls will be answered. When too many calls are answered, the hapless consumer gets a recorded message such as "Hello, we have an important message for you. Please hold the line . . . ." until an operator ends their call and the computer switches them to the waiting consumer.

Here is the telemarketing section from the model code:

Part 3. Telemarketing

50. This part of the code covers requirements for distance sellers, charities and fundraisers engaging in telemarketing. [Footnote 1] Other parties engaging in telemarketing are also encouraged to adopt the provisions in this part of the model code.

Identification information

51. At the earliest possible opportunity in an outbound telemarketing call, telemarketers shall:

(a) identify themselves;

(b) identify the direct marketer they represent;

(c) clearly state the purpose of the call; and

(d) if calling from outside of Australia, state the country from which they are calling.

52. When making an outbound telemarketing call, a telemarketer shall not block the transmission of the calling line identity to the receiving service.

53. The name, address and telephone number of the direct marketer and, where different, the telemarketing organisation, must be in a telephone directory or, if a new listing, available through a directory assistance service.

54. Where the purpose of the call is to sell a good or service telemarketers shall not represent that they are undertaking market research.

Information to be provided on request

55. When telemarketers or direct marketers contact a consumer they shall, at the request of the consumer, provide the following information:

(a) the telemarketer's or direct marketer's name, contact details, including at least its telephone number and street address, and the name of a person within the organisation who is responsible for handling consumer complaints; and

(b) details of the source from which the telemarketer or direct marketer obtained the consumer's personal information.

Permissible hours of calling

56. Without a consumer's consent, a telemarketer shall not make an outbound telephone or Automatic Calling Equipment call to contact a consumer before 8 am or after 9 pm local time at the consumer's location or on the following public holidays:

Christmas Day,

Good Friday, and

Easter Sunday. [Footnotes 2 and 3]

Line disconnection times

57. Where a telemarketer uses the telephone to contact a consumer, the telemarketer shall release the line within five seconds of the consumer hanging up or otherwise indicating that he or she requires the telemarketer to release the line.

Frequency of calling

58. A telemarketer, or its agents, shall not contact a consumer more than once in any 30 day period for the same or similar campaign without that consumer's prior consent.

Footnotes:

1 - Note that any conflict between this code and State and Territory door to door trading legislation will be resolved in favour of the legislation. Where the legislation does apply to telemarketing, telemarketers will have to comply with the legislation, regardless of this code's provisions.

2 - Where the restrictions on times of contact under door to door trading legislation (which may apply to telemarketing) in some States and Territories are more rigorous and would conflict if they apply to telemarketing, the legislation shall apply.

3 - Any parties adopting the model code are also encouraged to consult with key religious and ethnic organisations to develop a guideline for telemarketers for what other times and days would not be suitable for telemarketers to contact consumers.

SPAM email

Ex-directory (Silent Line) numbers

Telstra charges about 900,000 customers $32 a year for preventing people's number, name and address from appearing in the phone directories and from being available. This arguably saves the company 900,000 entries in the White Pages directories, whilst it charges $96 a year for an extra, normal sized, entry in the white pages for those people who want to be listed under two different names.

Telstra justifies this in terms of the costs of ensuring the number is not published (!) and in the extra load placed on their 013 service by inquiries for numbers which are not in the phone book. The latter argument has some validity. The 013 service is very costly to run, and it is evident that its currently free status causes it to be used by many ordinary people who couldn't be bothered opening a phone book, and by businesses who milk it for information which is more up-to-date than the white pages. (I think there is some justification in charging for directory assistance calls - but I cannot see a way of doing it without lots of complications and unfair effects on ordinary phone users, and the visually impaired.)

The silent-line "service" also prevents people's number from appearing in the non-Telstra CD-ROM directories, including the reverse-directory CD-ROMs which some companies publish - by taking White Pages books to third-world countries and having people type the contents into computers. The directories cannot be reliably scanned electronically. Telstra has tried legally for years to prevent this reuse and aggressive re-purposing of the White Pages information by other companies - so far without success. (Meanwhile Telstra sells a reverse directory Yellow Pages CD-ROM - complete with autodialing software to facilitate telemarketing of businesses! That is a major reason why I took my businesses out of the Yellow Pages.)

These reverse directory CD-ROMs (Telstra's and the other ones) should be prohibited - unless consumers - or businesses - give explicit permission for their name, address and phone number to be used in this way.

There are major changes to the whole telephone number and directory system. Part of this is motivated by the desire (technically challenging and costly, but probably worth it) for local number portability between carriers. The ACIF has a committee working on this. I am not sure what is happening - but hopefully this Integrated Public Number Database will include flags which specify whether a customer's number and other details can be divulged in printed directories, their Internet equivalent (http://www.whitepages.com.au/) or by the 013 inquiry service. There are other options, like having your number, but not address, in the phone book, or available via 013.

[End.]