Notable Australian academic Mark McLelland of The University of Wollongong has expressed well-grounded concerns that the country’s Great Barrier of Grief could rival The Great Firewall of China in its draconian ISP filtering policies, cutting off millions of Ozzie anime, manga, gaming, and BL fans from the international community.
What alarms me most about his observations is the fact that Malacanang and the Philippine House of Representatives has just recently passed a law that is intrinsically the same as Australia’s — which means we could be next on the chopping block.
As far as I’m concerned, this a case of the cure being worse than the disease, as I feel that cutting off millions of Filipino internet users will not protect our children from very determined sexual predators. Not only that, the new laws sound like they were put into place to protect the nonexistent virtues of fictional characters, as opposed to corralling real-life child-sex offenders and protecting would-be victims.
Is this another stellar example of our local politicos pandering to certain sectors of society to curry favor with the upcoming national elections? Or just another day at the office for our local politicians who are more concerned with putting their names on a bunch of laws without thinking too much about what’s in them? Gheezus cripes on a bike it makes me want to move to Mars the minute it is terraformed.
JPOP Manila 
I can’t even imagine myself not able to read mangas, read up on San Con, Kotaku, etc. Why on earth would they even think of having that particular bill? Heck, they didn’t even asked the public about it.
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you know what they say: people fear what they don’t understand. apparently many politicians of this generation are so out of touch with technology that they perceive the internet as some sort of threat to society, instead of a tool for communication, learning and entertainment.
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*shakes head at politicians who can’t make laws beneficial for the people and the country* Tsk~ ~_~ I get the feeling that these people only view pr0n online… As if it’s the only use of the internet.
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I guess, we need to cross-fingers on this one hoping it won’t be as bad as we could imagine. And for crying out loud! Philippines ain’t run by Computers to feel any threat from cyber terrorism or what-not, we’re run by corrupt officials. That’s the one they should focus on preventing, not the internet. geez! -_-
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My hubby went to the protest when we were still in Brisbane, hoping this wouldn’t be pushed into legislation in Oz. I really hate how those for this law thinks that an external party should “babysit” their kids while they’re on the Net when its a parent’s job to do so
Bleh. Hope the Philippines doesn’t enforce this!
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too true — as if prohibition laws ever did anything good >.>
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Geezz…and I thought Philippines is the only country I know who could have a crazy government controlling people using crappy laws…
But I kinda think about this for a long time; we have a government that likes to pass bills but not get into laws most of the time right? I mean come on, there are lots and lots of bills piling up way back since we weren’t born and most of them are I think just passed just for the sake of publicity. This is nothing new. And I guess, in my crazy opinion, why don’t we put our crossing fingers on this thing, all throughout until the end of election day, ne? >.<
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to be fair to the philippine government, australia also does not exactly have the best track record. they have enacted highly racist legislation against asian immigrants as well as their own aboriginal people so this sort of throttling of basic human freedoms should come as no surprise.
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