Take stand against online regulation

Published Jun 1, 2015

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Durban - The year was 1984. I was waiting with my matric class outside a cinema in the Durban city centre to see the movie 1984, based on George Orwell’s dystopian novel of the same name and, appropriately, one of our English setwork books that year.

Despite the school having reserved one of the theatres well in advance, there appeared to be a hiccup with our booking and we were growing increasingly restive standing there on the pavement.

The mood turned ugly when we discovered the reason for the delay. Two of our classmates, classified “coloured” by the laws governing the country at the time, would not be allowed in as that movie house was reserved for “whites only”.

If you’ve ever been in, or close to, a crowd when it’s gripped by anger, righteous or otherwise, you’ll know that the wave of emotion it gives off is a powerful, almost physical thing. The cinema staff clearly felt it and good sense prevailed. We were let in. All of us.

That little victory came flooding back 31 years later as I sat down to write today’s column. Usually I devote this space to the latest shiny gadget or clever app.

But this week I can’t in good conscience do that when we all face a threat that’s every much as Orwellian in its ambition and potential impact as the pernicious laws we boys rebelled against that day.

I’m talking about the recently gazetted Online Regulation Policy. If you’re a regular Sunday Tribune reader, you’ll know about this daft plan to censor the internet. It was the subject of last week’s page one lead story.

If you’re reading this column online, you’ll almost certainly have encountered articles about it, usually with scary headlines like “New internet censorship law worst in Africa”. You may have written them off as alarmist click bait.

They’re no exaggeration this time, though. This truly is a set of regulations that could have come straight from the pen of a PW Botha-era bureaucrat. They certainly demonstrate a similar level of understanding of how the internet works – zero, that is.

They’re being championed by the Film and Publications Board, a state organ that until now has been sliding quietly into well-deserved irrelevancy. This vestige of apartheid is responsible for vetting each movie and video game before it’s released onto the local market, deciding whether it’s suitable for public consumption and, if so, how old you should be to watch it.

In reality the board almost always just rubber-stamps the classification put on it by the distributors of the game or film. No doubt frustrated by its growing impotence, and shrinking slice of the state budget pie, it’s come up with a “cunning plan” that even the dunce Baldrick in Blackadder would have written off as too far-fetched.

“Let’s regulate the internet.”

Here’s how it will work. If you produce media of any sort in South Africa, you will have to register with the board as a distributor, then have everything pre-approved by the board’s censors before you post it to the web.

Yes, you read that correctly. From cute cat videos to breaking news clips of huge national importance, each will need to get a censor’s digital stamp of approval.

This will apply not just to mainstream media houses, but to individual bloggers and citizen journalists. Heck, the wording is so vague it could even apply to your gran when she wants to post that embarrassing video clip of your first birthday party on Facebook.

The regulations also give censors the power – unheard of since the days of apartheid – to come into and inspect the place of publication. In the case of most bloggers I know, this will be their kitchen or bedroom.

It would be laughable if it wasn’t so damn scary.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. I’d much rather be writing about the cool smartphone sitting on my desk waiting to be reviewed. I’m sure you’d rather be reading about that.

But I’m sure you also agree that if these regulations become law, we’ll all be a lot worse off. If so, I urge you to do something today to help stop them before they go any further along the road to becoming a reality.

Civil society watchdog the Right2Know campaign is leading the fight against web censorship in South Africa. They have a web page devoted to the subject, R2K.org.za/ handsoffourinternet, with plenty more information including links to the full text of the draft regulations and an online petition.

If a bunch of truculent teens back in 1984 could convince cinema management to defy the might of the apartheid state, surely the combined anger of South Africa’s internet users can succeed in quashing this latest ill-conceived attempt to resurrect Big Brother.

Visit my personal blog alanqcooper.tumblr.com for more on this story. Got any comments or questions? E-mail alanqcooper@ gmail.com or direct your tweets to @alanqcooper.

Sunday Tribune

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