Australia joins China, Burma, North Korea
4 January 2008 – 7:57 am by wg
That’s right. The newly elected Labor government has decided that they should protect children from pornography, violence, and hate material on the Internet by imposing mandatory filtering of Internet traffic at the ISP level. Such filtering would be based on a black list decided by ACMA bureaucrats (who don’t yet exist and haven’t been requested by the department), based on lists provided by religious and family groups. Such a plan is impractical, expensive, invasive, trivial to circumvent, and ineffective. I’m not even going to begin to go in to the technical difficulties.
Legitimate critique so far has been rejected by the minister responsible, Senator Stephen Conroy:
“Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation on the internet is like going down the Chinese road, If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree.”"
Media coverage:
It should also be pointed out that the problem they are supposedly trying to solve (that is, protecting children, not imposing the views of the Government, the Labor party, and religious and family groups on the population) has already been “solved” just as well by the previous government’s “NetAlert” initiative, which provides user-end Internet content filters free of charge to Australian residents. Responsible parents should already be using some kind of content filter and be monitoring their childrens Internet access. We don’t need the Government to act as our Internet babysitter.
More info:
