Whilst a great sounding concept I have serious reservations about this plan being pushed by those who think its actually possible to acheive a total ban on children accessing adult content.
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22959799-5005961,00.htmlNew restrictions on online chatrooms, websites and mobile phone content will be introduced within a month to stop children viewing unsuitable material.
From January 20 new laws will be in effect, imposing tougher rules for companies that sell entertainment-related content on subscription internet sites and mobile phones.
It is the first time content service providers will have to check that people accessing MA15-plus content are aged over 15 years and those accessing R18-plus and X18-plus content are over 18.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will be able to force content providers to take down offensive material and issue notices for live content to be stopped and links to the content deleted.
But ACMA chairman Chris Chapman said adults will not be affected by the new laws.
"In developing these new content rules, ACMA was guided by its disposition to allow adults to continue to read, hear and see what they want, while protecting children from exposure to inappropriate content, regardless of the delivery mechanism," Mr Chapman said in a statement.
Providers of live services, such as chatrooms, must have their service professionally assessed to determine whether its "likely content" should be restricted.
Whilst many have called for this sort of regulation some time ago its not ever been possible to implement without parents taking the required steps to implement some sort of home filtering, that is of course part of their legal responsibility in protecting their offspring from unecessary and often graphic images, this thus far has been the case but it seems with the refusal to allow net domain names such as .sex . porn etc etc by the US government, the entire porn industry is still lumped in with the rest of the non-porn providing web userbase, surely a stronger case could be made for generating a seperate domain for porn vendors to ensure minors are protected in that way ?
My personal concern here is with abuse of the "assesing", filtering and take down demands made, we have already seen The Pirate Bay threatened with a listing as a child porn site to get it blacklisted worldwide, its a known fact that the road to over tight regulation is a one way step, rights are never returned once ceeded.
I,m sure there's much to debate here but without responsible parents there is little chance of ever combatting the problem of enquiring minds accessing adult content.
