If ever you wanted to see the test case of South African civil servants having an over-inflated sense of their own self-importance, look no further than the lunacy happing over there at the Film and Publications Board (FPB).
Created by the Apartheid regime – let’s not forget – to censor anything that offended the racist verkrampte mindset of a thankfully bygone era, this bunch of vainglorious morons now wants to reign in the internet as it once did free speech.
The FPB gazetted a Draft Online Regulation Policy document in March, stating: “Any person who intends to distribute any film, game, or certain publication in the Republic of South Africa shall first comply with section 18(1) of the Act by applying, in the prescribed manner, for registration as film or game and publications distributor.”
It’s 2015. Please can someone ring up on the telephone the free speech killers at FPB and let them know. Also, tell them, it’s the internet, stupid.
The stated reason is to “protect children from exposure to disturbing and harmful material… [and] to criminalise child pornography and the use and exposure of children to pornography”.
It’s embarrassing to have to “explain” what is going on, as a radio station asked me to do this week, when what the Film and Publications Bored’s [sic] mindset and behaviour just beggars description.
The FPB is even more out of touch with reality than Honest Malusi Gigaba over there at Home Affairs breaking the tourism sector because no one will admit what a catastrophic failure he’s caused with these onerous visa requirement for unabridged birth certificates. A Boeing a day of tourists has stopped arriving from Beijing.
For the rest of us, in the real world, it’s patently obvious that you can’t control the prepublication of anything on theinternet. It’s just too big. Google says 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
The tech giants of the real world – Amazon,Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter – spends hundreds of millions of dollars on software to detect criminal behaviour, from porn to piracy to 419 scams to phishing. They’re a helluva lot better at it than the digital novices stuck in 1984 at the Bored [sic]. Gmail and Hotmail, owned by Google and Microsoft respectively, scan for child porn and alert the authorities.
This nonsensical notion of pre-approving content to be published online is not only vapid, but utterly impractical. It’s not trying to find the needle in the haystack, as much as check every single strand of hay before the farmer can feed it to his cows. It’s lunacy of the highest order. Monty Python couldn’t invent anything as daft as the Film and Publications Board, whose motto is “We inform. You choose.” I also don’t know what it means.
Instead, they are suppressing our digital economy – already long strangled by a clueless, ineffective Department of Communications that has bedevilled this crucial sector of the economy with mangled policy (what’s changed), policy inertia (what’s changed), and an utter failure to enable –through state-owned Telkom – the next-generation of broadband access throughADSL and fibre (what’s changed).
Like the misguided Home Affairs attempt to stop child trafficking (any number of experts has endless pointed how the visaresponse is the wrong mechanism to tackle the stated goal), the Bored’s [sic] stated intention can’t be curbed by its intended mechanism, which will have much more devastating effects on the real economy.
Child pornography is traded on the Dark Web. So far out of sight of most people, they don’t even know the Dark Web exists.
It’s the digital equivalent of the Maginot Line. Instead of shielding us, the Bored is starving the digital economy.
Case in point are this Apartheid-era agency’s attempt to regulate the apps sold in Apple and Google’s app stores. The process fee need for the registration is enough of barrier to entry for apps developers – who often give their games away for free – not to bother with South Africa. Another lost opportunity. It’s the death of our digital economy by a thousand pointless bureaucratic cuts.
Our biggest problem in global terms is that the South African digital and online market is so small that iTunes, Netflix and Amazon just ignore us. Now the digital defeatists at the Bored want to deter anyone willing to invest in South Africa with spurious and pointless morality tests.This from an agency set up under Apartheid that demonstrates this free speech-defying logic hasn’t left it.
It’s the digital equivalent of putting up a toll gate in the middle of the ocean. To paraphrase the paywall debate, people just sail around. South Africa is literally an island in internet terms. If we make it any harder for people to publish online, they’ll just skip us.
* This column originally appeared in the Financial Mail.
