A recent article from Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald reveals the plans of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to fine people who create hyperlinks to sites on the Authority’s official blacklist. Which raises the question, how much is a hyperlink worth? The Australian Communications and Media Authority recently threatened the host of an online broadband discussion forum with an $11,000/day fine over a link, if that’s any indication.

 At present ACMA’s list of banned sites doesn’t impact Aussies too much, but that could all change if their government begins to apply a proposed Internet filtering program. Until then web surfers from Down Under may feel that they’re OK, but this most recent revelation shows how far ACMA is willing to go to control Australians’ activities online.

 Wikileaks, a site that has been placed on ACMA’s blacklist had this to say: “The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.” Wikileaks has come under fire from regulatory bodies for its mission to publish anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, or religious documents. Wikileaks has exposed the banned list of sites of several countries, including Thailand, Denmark and now Australia.

 Regarding ACMA’s efforts to restrict user access to Wikileaks, Electronic Frontiers Australia noted how ACMA’s own list of banned sites may someday find itself in the public sphere. “We note that, not only do these incidents show that the ACMA censors are more than willing to interpret their broad guidelines to include a discussion forum and document repository, it is demonstrably inevitable that the Government’s own list is bound to be exposed itself at some point in the future. The Government would serve the country well by sparing themselves, and us, this embarrassment.”

 Australia has become a new focus for those concerned about controlling information on the Internet, with Reporters Without Borders placing the South Pacific nation on its “watch list” of countries that are enforcing anti-democratic internet restrictions.

 The larger report from Reporters Without Borders on the state of freedom of information on the Internet was seized by Australian Senator Scott Ludlam, who is quoted as saying “This report demolished the Communications Minister’s contention that Australia is just following other comparable democracies, we are not. The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the Internet. I agree with Reporters Without Borders. If you consider this kind of net censorship in the context of Australia’s anti-terror laws, it paints a disturbing picture indeed.”

 However, dissenting groups are lauding the proposed Internet censorship scheme. Citizens such as Jim Wallace, the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, have expressed their desire to see the sex industry and online gambling sites go broke as a result of the censorship scheme.