Finally, a media regulator for Banana Watch
I have not, in the hour or so since I began looking at the Finkelstein Independent Media Inquiry‘s 500 page report, fully digested it.
But like the bloggers it now seeks to regulate, that doesn’t mean that I lack a point of view. And it’s this.
Any person who seeks to regulate the internet, and then refers to hits, should immediately be disqualified from further comment as their digital knowledge is ten years out of date.
Is it not a 500 page report?
Tim Burrowes, a great argument. (Mary Shelley’s?) Finklestein should take heed of slippery bananas.
Thank you, Colin Delaney, for creating the site that we will now use as the ultimate example of The Long Tail.
PS If he is still in the country filming Celebrity Apprentice, I think you might approach The Hoff to headline the TV pilot episode of Banana Watch. Or do you thin Pammy would be more appealing?
I agree.
Any ageing senior executive, politician (not in an IT portfolio), celebrity or Tibetan monk (still living on a mountain in the remote wilds of Tibet) can be excused the use of the term ‘hits’ when referring to website pageviews, visitors or unique visitors.
However the head of a significant review of the media, and their staff, should have spent the time to build an understanding of the mediums they are considering regulating.
This might be passed off as an insignificant mistake. However it is not. The number of hits used refers to the crux of the report – the line drawn as to which sites would be regulated and which would not be regulated.
It discredits the report when a technical measure (the number of requests to a web server for files) is used as the key terminology UNLESS this is what was meant.
With webpages potentially consisting of tens, or even hundreds, of hits, perhaps Finkelstein did mean what he said. On this basis, any blog with a homepage consisting of 30 hits (graphics, CSS, text, etc) would only require 500 visits in a year (1.5 per day) to qualify for regulation.
What also needs to be clarified is whether search engines and other robot visits would count (we have to protect software from potentially dangerous images and words) and whether the site owner’s own visits to the count would count (thereby protecting them against themselves).
That’s not to mention the need to protect foreign visitors – even when content is legal in their own country (aka an Australian operated Manga blog discussing current events in Australia for Japanese people through the use of the most graphic Japanese manga styles).
And how will Australian-owned and operated blogs and news sites hosted overseas get moderated? Will we see a collapse in the Australian hosting industry as blogs and news sites move to international hosting so they fall outside of regulation? Will we see blogs and news sites owned by foreign entities and hosted international,h, but with the writing done by Australians? How would that fall under regulation?
Complete fail Mr Finkelstein.
By the way, my apologies to Glen Fuller, and possibly others. We exchanged a couple of comments here on Friday night, shortly before we made a site migration. It looks like we may have lost an hour or two’s worth of comments – if that is indeed so, my apologies and please do feel free to repost if we don’t get them back.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
I thought it best to chime in as it seems our organisation has unwillingly been dragged into this argument all across the Australian internets and I managed to trace it back to this forum.
For the record, Banana Watch welcomes the proposed regulation. The internet is a chaotic place full of anarchists, perverts and hippies. The people who shout “Nanny State!” every time civilised people like Finkelstein try to bring some rule and decorum to the world are the same ruffians that discard banana peels willy-nilly.
M.S Murdoch
Editor at Large/CEO
Banana Watch