Segwist

It is almost crazy enough to be a joke. Unfortunately for Australia its deadly serious. The Australian Federal Government is steamrolling ahead with plans to impose mandatory internet filtering at the ISP level and will be effectively censoring the internet in this country. The list of sites to block will be and remain to be a secret blacklist, casting even more doubt and controversy amongst digital professionals who rely on the the web for their livelihood. I really don’t need to stress how scary this is. A secret blacklist of blocked sites with absolutely no way for the public to have a say on the content.

It goes from scary to stupid once you consider the increasing evidence that the system will be costly, will slow down our already sub-world-standard broadband and be (the best bit) easily circumvented. So why all the fuss? The usual well meaning discussion against Bad People looking at photos of children. A worthy battle but one that is being fought in the wrong arena. All is not lost however, as much loved geek ISP iiNet has volunteered to participate in the study with claims that it is doing so to prove how ineffective it is. An odd stance, truly. Further more some powerful opposition is mounting against the ill-formed proposal. On the public front, there are plenty of ways to be involved, ranging from the usual well meaning Facebook Group to the excellent resource and thinking person’s activist site, GetUp.

Set a powerful precedent by being involved in: Save The Net.

Recommended Reading: ABC News article on the factual fairytales of the filter advocates.

Tags: ABC, Australia, Censorship, Conroy, GetUp, iiNet, Internet, No Clean Feed, Save The Net

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.