December 31st, 2007
Australia Moves to Censor the Internet
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy today announced a requirement for ISPs to provide a “clean feed” for all homes, schools and any public PCs accessible by children. This follows up on a pre-election Nov. 19th Labor Party press release which first announced a proposed Cyber-safety plan.
Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says new measures are being put in place to provide greater protection to children from online pornography and violent websites.
Senator Conroy says it will be mandatory for all internet service providers to provide clean feeds, or ISP filtering, to houses and schools that are free of pornography and inappropriate material.
Online civil libertarians have warned the freedom of the internet is at stake, but Senator Conroy says that is nonsense.
He says the scheme will better protect children from pornography and violent websites. Source: ABC News
We Say: Readers, how do you feel about this issue? Are we heading down a slippery slope? It’s bad enough that North American ISPs such as Comcast and Sympatico are blocking P2P traffic; do you think the U.S. and Canada will follow this path? And do you want them to?
Jody says:
There is a big difference between a private company and a government blocking traffic. You can always switch companies, even if you do not the fact that you can acts as a competitive check on the company. Its a lot harder to change governments.
December 31st, 2007 at 1:33 pm
John Tidball says:
It will end up in the U.S. eventually. Big Brother is not just standing around… he’s roaming trying to screw things up.
December 31st, 2007 at 4:33 pm
Craig says:
I’m not sure why everyone is getting so uptight about this. The govt says you can opt-out if you wish by calling your isp.
December 31st, 2007 at 8:04 pm
John Corliss says:
I think the “slippery slope” we’ve headed down was when we allowed porn to be freely displayed on the internet. At the very least, the implemetation of the “.prn” domain extension and laws requiring porn sites to use it should have been done a long time ago. If we, as a culture and society refuse to implement some form of self control in this regard, then there’s little hope for us. Just because something makes a lot of money is NOT a good excuse for doing it.
January 1st, 2008 at 5:18 am
the above people are morons says:
If you wanna save the kiddies from Jamie Jameson’s buttock parents and dumb Australian polly-facists use
OpenDNS
www.opendns.com
Australia my country of morons and backward idiots.
January 4th, 2008 at 7:38 pm