• Internet Censorship 29 April 1999.  My brief submission to the Senate Information Technology Committee on the folly of Senator Alston's bill to censor web sites, ostensibly to protect children.  senate-it/scit_rw3.html
  
  
• Telemarketing In 1998 the ACCC is accepted an Australian Direct Marketing "Code of Conduct" which would give legitimacy to outbound telemarketers calling 362 days a year, 8AM to 9PM.  See the tm/ directory for the latest information on this and on a similar process in 2005.
  
  
• Do-Not-Call Registry  In late 2005, the Department released a discussion paper on how telemarketing in Australia might be regulated by a Do-Not-Call system to protect people at home and at work.  See the dnc/ directory for my submission to DCITA.
  
  
• Customer Activated Malicious Call Trace  Some material from my old website is here: mct/ .  Please also read more updated material in my Do-Not-Call submission.
  
  
• A big submission to a Senate Inquiry which covers most of the issues I have been involved between 1992 and 1998.

Senate Select Committee on Information Technology

Commencing in January 1998, the Committee is inquiring into the effectiveness of self-regulatory schemes in the information and communications industries.  The home page for the Committee is http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/it_ctte/index.htm . This Committee is the successor to that which inquired several times into Internet content regulation matters - the (deep breath now . . . ) Senate Select Committee on Community Standards Relevant to the Supply of Services Utilising Telecommunications Technologies .
 
 

>>>> Read my submission, in HTML, here <<<<

(My submission is also available as a Microsoft Word document, or an RTF document.)

Electronic Frontiers of Australia, http://www.efa.org.au , have their submission available at: http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/Welcome.html.

The Hansard of the Committee's hearings, in .PDF format, are at the Hansard site. An HTML copy of part of the 27 April hearings, in Adelaide, with two witnesses from Electronic Frontiers of Australia, and one from the West Australian Internet Association is here.

My submission has three main aspects:
 

1. An analysis of the different forms of regulation - legislation, voluntary-self-regulatory and forced-self-regulatory - the latter when the governments tells an industry to regulate itself on threat of legislative controls if it fails to do so adequately.
2. Criteria for choosing, on an industry-by-industry basis (or according to the problem - there is not always a specific "industry" involved) what form of regulation is best.
3. Case histories of many of the issues I have been involved in since 1992 - plus some new ones, such as the problem of mass-media privacy invasion, which is one that the Committee is particularly interested in.
Here is the Summary of my submission, followed by the table of contents.

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

Page numbers in green are for the Word version.

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  35
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

Update history

• 2023 August 21:  Added my critique of the exposure draft of the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023.
• 2005 November 28.  Added link to Do-Not-Call directory.
  
• 2005 October 19.  Added Malicious Call Trace and deleted critique of Project Gatekeeper.
  
• 1999 April 29. Added link to submission to the Senate IT Committee on Internet censorship.
• 1998 October 16.  Established telemarketing directory.
• 1998 June 25.  Added link to my CV, to the /telco/articles/ section and a note that I haven't heard much back from the Gatekeeper people.
• 1998 May 19.  Added Gatekeeper critique.
• 1998 May 18.  Added link to the Senate IT Inq. Hansard site and to my HTML file with part of the 27-4-98 hearings.
• 1998 May 15.  Added HTML version of Senate IT Inq. submission.
• 1998 January 22.  Page established with Word and RTF versions of Senate IT Inq. submission.