How To Censor The Internet One Country At A Time

Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy says that 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.
Source: ABC News coverage of the announcement.

The Christmas – New Year period is usually a ‘slow news’ time, and apart from natural disasters and Christmas stories, nothing much other than sport, family and celebrating appear to distract Australians from their usual routines.

Often new policy details seem to be released at this time in the hope that people are too distracted to take any notice.

I first heard about this announcement in a message from Teeg in the US via Skype early this morning. Since then it has been the subject of a number of messages via Twitter and email.

Censorship and Child Pornography:

Any worthwhile attempt to curb exploitation of children, especially in the area of child pornography usually has my support.

However, the potential for misuse of this latest idea makes it a dangerous move.

From the increasing number of court convictions of people who download pornography one would assume that the tracking of these individuals is already quite successful.

This raises the question of how much further the government needs to go in this area.

Then there are the questions of Internet speed and the cost to users, points covered by Duncan Riley. in his detailed post about the issue.

Another great post by Des Walsh adds another perspective to the issue.

As Duncan says, the future may have been told in this pre-election video about Kevin Rudd.