Briefly: Fran Foo from Australian IT reports that the starting date for the Government’s live mandatory ISP filtering trial is imminent and that 16 ISPs are in the final round of the selection process. She writes:
One issue understood to be stalling the process is that service providers have been negotiating for extra funding.
A mere $300,000 has been allocated to fund the live trials although $44.2 million out of the Government’s $125.8 million cyber-safety plan has been allocated to filtering.
However, Foo’s assertion that ‘Communications Minister Stephen Conroy hopes to introduce two forms of content filtering: a mandatory scheme based on a blacklist of illegal web pages, and an optional “clean feed” of links that would automatically block certain types of content, such as adult material’ is incorrect. The mandatory scheme is not based on illegal web pages, but rather prohibited content — content that is RC, X18+, R18+ and MA15+.
