It's not often that I am proud of my country. The governments views on technology and related new media and then the legislation that either must be put in place for the protection of users or in other situations where The legalization is either put or kept in place for reasons or almost reasons unknown *cough* r18 *cough*.
Many of the progressive movements and think tanks about technology occur away from Australia and concern mostly Europe's and America's Internet space, but because so many servers are hosted in Europe and America, so many superpower online companies and organizations call it home. Although this is both understandable and discussions about the big ICT issues will be more effective than talks here, but Australia really should step up more often and discuss the issues and how they effect us as a nation, but it seems as if the reverse is happening, okay, that maybe an exaggeration, but certainly in high school education ICT is being neglected, I can only speak of my state, but I bet that the others are not much better.
The Internet is like a new world, with its own rules and language, every person in Australia will have some form of contact with it and yet its presumes that young people because they have grown up with it, will instantly understand the ins and outs, because they understand OMG, FML and LOL. That they are safe from online attack, or that this online attack is not as dangerous as being attacked in the offline world. Or the reverse, that young people should not be allowed online because no matter how much they are educated the Internet is still not safe for them. Young people are not being educated of the risks in practical ways.
I digress, today I am proud.
The five major ISPs have teamed up to trial a system to help stamp out Internet piracy without infringing on our rights like protect IP does. This is an amazing step. It does have a really long way to go before we see the impacts of this or even if it will be effective at all. There is no promise that this will even leave the trial stages, but its like the ISPs have seemingly taken many of the counter comments used regarding sopa and protect ip and built a model based on that and I am amazed. This is world changing stuff, more than the carbon tax or anything the Australian government has legislated in recent years, hopefully this will show the middle ground where the user gets a voice and the massive copyright holders don’t own the Internet.
