The only saving grace is that the Department of Home Affairs (of which the Film and Publications Board is part) is so incompetent that their reach exceeds their grasp, and it is relatively easy to circumvent their authoritarian tendencies.
Until recently many South African Apple device owners had Kenya accounts to buy games (including most educational content) because of the Board's refusal to allow South African App Store games without rating every game itself (eventually they relented).
Home Affairs, which also handles citizenship and immigration, is a mess, and has made the South African passport worthless thanks to rampant corruption and incompetence (historically anyway- corruption may be improving a bit, but the damage is done).
Their latest trick: to require burdensome documentation from international travelers with children ostensibly to combat child trafficking (because of by dubious data from a lobby group that caught a Minister's ear). It's expected to severely dent the Sputh African tourism industry.
TlDr: Even if these proposed censorship regulations come to pass, it is unlikely that they will have much of an effect thanks to the incompetence of the would-be censors.
In the short term you are right. However the legal authority to enforce censorship will be established. All it will take is for the Department of Home Affairs to become less incompetent and suddenly things will become very serious.
I think history has shown us that it's rarely a good idea to assume that people will remain incompetent, that puppet dictators will remain puppets, etc.
As a South African, the department of Home Affairs in the Western Cape is actually doing an excellent job regarding birth certificates, passports, ids etc. The bottleneck is in Gauteng.
As I intimated, things are improving in some areas thanks to improved IT system controls, but the quality of the improvement is very very uneven. Even in Gauteng, some offices function excellently, while others are awful. It comes down to the individual branch managers.
There still are huge bottlenecks in dealing with "refugee" claims, and with the legal immigration processes, and the legacy of past corruption (last 25 years) is still haunting South Africa. Based on overall performance, I think "incompetent" is still a fair characterisation.
Sounds about right for the fpb in sa. They make a lot of talk about protecting against pornography specifically child pornography. Given south Africa's current trend of sexual violence against minors it's understandable but they are pretty much unable to enforce anything.
The sa government has a very mediocre understanding overall of how the technology that makes up the Internet works and likes to propose rather broad and technically unfeasable laws that inevitably are either ignored or eventually abandoned.
It wasn't that long ago that they expected any isp to be keeping packet logs of any traffic through thier network for a period of five years on the off chance that the police might need it. It took a fair bit of back and forth to get them to realize how absurd such an approach was.
I would expect that if this does come to pass and youtube is blocked etc, that even the most naïve user will suddenly discover what a vpn is and life will continue. ( never underestimate the technological capability of someone , including your grandmother, to find a way to watch thier cat videos on the Internet )
The idea here is: reasoning does not work. You reason for good things, against stupid laws, but you have no leverage.
We'll have to walk thru pain, "fear and loathing", most of those laws will be passed somewhere, in a few years or decades they'll prove to not work. Then they will be gradually repelled. Now there will be leverage: "this law was tried in a country CCC and it went sour".
We humans actually suck at designing something (like laws). Our only bet is evolution. You can't reason. You can only show. So we'll have to try ideas even when it's obvious they're stupid.
Sadly, the notion that 'It was tried in <country name> and didnt work so we should avoid it' doesn't really apply to politics. Consider Australia's current internet censorship and metadata legislation, the same laws have been tried all over Europe, the US, Asia and a host of other countries and proved worthless, and yet the government pushes forward with them. Its simply for appearances, the leadership needs to look like its tough on whatever the hot topic of the hour is.
I would be inclined to argue that their ineffectiveness at achieving their stated purpose combined with their gross violation of the privacy of everyone in the countries affected makes them worthless.
I am all for multi-tasking, but you would really think that Africa would have bigger fish to fry right now, without worrying about censoring the Internet.
No, in fact my original post said I am all for multi-tasking. I do not understand the knee-jerk reactions agains prioritization, however. I guess I am just of the mind that if your country has the world's highest rates of rape, murder, assault, and unemployment are having trouble feeding your citizens, perhaps Internet censorship may not be a top priority -- perhaps your resources aren't being focused enough.
It was a snippy comment. If you don't specify "South" Africa (which itself is a generalization), people can get jimmies rustled. It is like saying I live in America. People know exactly what you mean from context, but some will be pedantic about "America" including many countries in North and South America.
If there were no context (not the situation with this post), then it could lead to confusion.
Well, I was comparing continents to continents and countries to countries, not the US to all of the African continent. How does your image look if you overlay the entire continent of the Americas over the continent of Africa?
Firstly, South Africa is Africa's richest country. It's not Denmark, but it isn't Somalia, either.
Secondly, freedom of speech is a fundamental issue and not a luxury. I'm sure per-capita GDP in the US was lower when the Bill of Rights was written than it is in SA today. In fact, all problems anywhere in Africa are political. Strengthening the freedom of expression is one of the best ways to get at Africa's problems.
Is the Internet really the biggest problem around, that governments spend so much time and effort controlling it? It's become a bike shed for governments.
Yes, I am from South Africa, and right now I have to remote into my home computer to shut it down, before our power provider (parastatal monopoly Eskom), shuts down the power across the whole of Cape Town for 2.5 hours because they are so severely miss managed.
But yes, this seems appropriate.
As others have mentioned if this actually became legitimate it would mean nothing. They have nobody to police this.
How is publication specified? Is it a single word, a character, a millisecond of sound or video? I wonder how that scales. Could be the first real DoS of a ministry. Bring it on....
Factors that prevent states from going totalitarian:
- small size
- decentralized/local government structure
- limited geopolitical influence
- high level of education of the population
- history/culture of democracy
Large, powerful states with a lesser educated population will inevitably drift towards totalitarianism over time. This implies the use of various means of population control, with total surveillance being first and foremost.
>>Large, powerful states with a lesser educated population will inevitably drift towards totalitarianism
How about India?
Don't treat states or societies as people, they are not people rather they are made of people. Totalitarianism isn't the outcome of a system it rather the outcome of the people oppress and the cowards who do nothing to stop it.
Singapore is centralized, has comparatively large population, especially for its size, and no history of democracy. That's where you become halfway there.
Banning porn can be seen as wanting to ban oppression/exploitation. Freedom is not absolute -- because at some point one persons freedom interferes with another persons freedom (AKA your freedom ends where your fist meet my face).
A lot of people will pretend that porn is about freedom, that selling sex is about freedom, that selling drugs is about freedom... And while you can make arguments for all those things, that's not to say that any kind of legislation by definition is "anti-freedom". Legislation can be a means to enforce freedoms too.
Certain politicians in Iceland wanted to ban a particular subset of pornography (hardcore, violence, etc). I don't remember hearing that any progress was made on that legislation, but I could just be uninformed on that front.
Until recently many South African Apple device owners had Kenya accounts to buy games (including most educational content) because of the Board's refusal to allow South African App Store games without rating every game itself (eventually they relented).
Home Affairs, which also handles citizenship and immigration, is a mess, and has made the South African passport worthless thanks to rampant corruption and incompetence (historically anyway- corruption may be improving a bit, but the damage is done).
Their latest trick: to require burdensome documentation from international travelers with children ostensibly to combat child trafficking (because of by dubious data from a lobby group that caught a Minister's ear). It's expected to severely dent the Sputh African tourism industry.
TlDr: Even if these proposed censorship regulations come to pass, it is unlikely that they will have much of an effect thanks to the incompetence of the would-be censors.