Don't get me wrong, I am all for protecting children from harmful content, but I then also think that this needs to become responsibility of schools, parents etc. Some snippets about the FPB policy below:
Yup. What FPB can do is facilitate the availability of free parental blocking software. That's all they should do. As well as run awareness campaigns for parents that such and such software is available to block content they did not approve of which can be a whitelist i.e. very easy to maintain. Everything else is blocked by default.
Children need to be protected by their parents first. Secondly there are already child lock software available.
Case in point: We frequently receive complaints on our marketplace about "pornographic" content (read: lingerie -
http://www.bidorbuy.co.za/category/917/Clothing_Shoes_Accessories_Womens_Clothing_Lingerie.jsp). We also receive complaints about products not agreeing with cultural, religious, political background - none of which are offensive (i.e. people complaining about the insensitivity of books critical towards a religion, political group etc). This goes as far as people complaining about "50 Shades of Grey" being sold online, where the same is tolerated by people walking through a CNA or bookstore. 99% of those complaints are baseless, as they do not violate or infringe on any persons rights. I also think that accessing certain content is by choice and as such, if a school allows access to PornHub on their WiFi network, it should really be the school made accountable and not the children accessing such content. In the same sense, parents should install content filters on phones and laptops to provide age-compliant content. There are many applications an only proxies out there, which provide this content filtering already.
Sure but you're a business. Your users if they banded together and threatened to boycott your site or your advertisers would pretty much see you do a 180 turn and you'd be banning that lingerie or that book.
My biggest worry is that under the umbrella "let's protect our children from the evil of the internet", that SA will result in a nanny-/police-state, comparable to the SOPA-days in the US or how Russia, Turkey, Korea police internet content. Would the FPB now decide if gay marriage/relationships is inappropriate for kids and as such censor all such content (although such content might be opinion pieces and does not include nudity)? What about a critical documentary against the leading party? Or a church? Or a specific demographics?
Funnily enough Russia's internet is pretty free if compared to a place like the UK. Only USA has genuine free speech protections.
I think if you read a few of the pages of the draft (
http://www.fpb.org.za/profile-fpb/legislation1/514-draft-online-regulation-policy-2014/file) you will notice, that the FPB makes the draft out to be protecting children, but paints this with a very broad brush - i.e. covering religion, politics, race etc and I would fear that such attempt would stifle any open discussion about issues, since the FPB would just make content disappear before it actually sees it's light (I doubt that they will ever manage to do this, as this would mean, they would have to take control of the actual Internet).
When the FPB means "Online content" it is actually pretty much everything online:
Let this sink in for a moment:
Oh true. Remember this is South Africa where if you order more than 3 items in seperate packages online from abroad in one year, you must register as an importer. Where our duty free allowance is a pitiful R250 per year for gifts - which is total BS because a gift should never require payment of a VAT or duty- after all you still have the money and you can still spend it on goods which generate VAT.
So in essence, how will those intermediaries be able to filter content without "spying" on your every move. With this would then also come bypassing of encryption/HTTPs/VPNs to be able to classify such content. This has broad implications for all our privacy.
They don't need to spy on your every move. They can forbid access to non-whitelisted sites or access is allowed only to these sites which meet FPB's political correctness standards. All else is verboten. They don't need to see that you wanted to connect to a non-approved site, in fact they could even prevent such info from being recorded. The effect will be that you can't get to those non-whitelisted domains.
The policy covers anyone and any content, irrespective of where the content originates from. So technically, if you bypass local filters via VPN or other means, you could get yourself into trouble for showing/viewing content which the FPB deems illegal (which is in their policy really undefined what inappropriate means and seems to be rather subjective):
It's mostly subjective when it comes to what governments think need censoring. One's man's hate speech is another man's right to free speech.
Hold on, but BidOrBuy already sells products - DVDs and games which have not been FPB rated. Surely it's "illegal" and yet it's legal. Customs also allows the import of any game or DVD under the sun although several may be banned in SA but legal in a place like USA.
If you think about all of the above, the FPB's policy is not enforceable - and I leave it with this (and why we should not burn tax-payer money):
It's not enforceable UNLESS they force ISP level filtering, I would think. There's no way in heck that Youtube, Vimeo etc will help them put FPB logos on these videos.
