Australia will filter Internet
February 22, 2008 – 11:01 am
Senator Conroy has given the green-light to ISP filtering, acknowledging it could affect internet speeds. In his speech to the Internet Industry Association last evening, he confirmed that the Rudd Government?s election commitment to introduce ISP level filtering would go ahead.Secure Computing Magazine reports:
?Labor has never argued that ISP filtering is a silver bullet solution, but it is an important step in the overall strategy to make the internet a safer place for children,? Conroy said.
Although he acknowledged ISP level filtering could potentially affect Internet speeds, Conroy added little else to quell concerns surrounding the issue, other than to say there would be a trial process to iron out any technical anomalies.
The Minister also released a press release welcoming a new report from the ACMA on filtering in use around the world:
?These filtered services will provide protection for children from internet websites containing harmful content.?
As many of us who disagree with the plan have noted, harmful content encompasses a huge range of content - anything from X rated material, to sites talking about health issues.
Like Stil says: last night was the perfect opportunity to reveal more details about the plan. Conroy chose not to and I suspect it’s because he still doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing.
I’ll update with more news as it comes to hand. Subscribe to the RSS feed for the latest developments.
- Mike
3 Responses to “Australia will filter Internet”
This really would be unprecedented in the Western world. The Senator likes to point at systems in the UK and Scandinavia, but they block a few thousand sites - what he’s proposing is nine or ten orders of magnitude more.
And no field trial blocking 800 sites for a few hundred test participants is going to give us any idea what filtering 100 billion web pages for 20 million Australians is going to be like.
By Danny Yee on Feb 22, 2008
this is media, the internet being a source of media, censorship.
By James on Feb 22, 2008
This is the beginning of the end. Freedom of thought and expression cannot be tolerated by governments. It’s all about control.
Our media is controlled and filtered by the rich few, the internet represents the great levelling field of news and views. Naturally most government would like to prevent this…
I always thought America would do this before us. After all, they have the “Patriot act” and various other forms of population control.
By Rik on Nov 23, 2008