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Australian Labor Party Proposes ISP Level Filter
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian Labor Party (much the same as the Democrats in the US) are claiming they will force ISPs to block violent and pornographic content if elected. From the article: 'Mr Beazley said all households would be included in the policy unless there was a specific request for access to such material. It was "too hard" for many parents to install internet blockers on their computers to prevent offensive material being downloaded.'"
The license fees a gaming establishment are higher than the licenses for a brothel which is more expensive than getting a carrier license for an ISP. The ISP will be cheaper.
Any of the three would require mountain of paperwork and I would hate to think how bad it would to combine all three.
It's more of a "the government says this" and the public says "yeah try and enforce it" kind of thing really.
The two major governments are reasonably conservative (although an analogy of the labor party to the democrats is just plain farsical) and so we get crap like this proposed.
Also, puritanical implies religious, Australia is very secular, and this is more a case of "working class mums and dads don't want their kids looking up porn".
That said, this is a completely ludicrious proposal by the labor party and needless to say they've lost my vote for the next federal election.
Hosting porn sites in Australia has been banned since 2000 under the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999,
They have the same restrictions for web content providers as they do for broadcast television producers. More info here.
I know AOL UK offers parental filters as part oftheir package. Surely AOL Australia, and various other ISPs offer the same. So if local filtering software is too much hassle, Change ISP, morons!
- chinese Web-TVs that stream sport events whose broadcasting rights in Italy are owned by satellite operator SKY;
- Gambling/sport betting/online casinos, that are required to pay a royalty/tax to operate in Italy;
The worst part of the deal is that no formal trial is done before the order is given to ISPs, so websites don't have any chance to defend their rights. Oh, and citizens don't have the right to know the full list of restricted websites.
Not sure how or why you got modded up. Seems like a troll to me, but I'll bite.
Kids are not free human beings! Parents are the custodians of their kids until the children have been properly trained to become full-fleged members of society with all of the rights and responsibilities that implies. To put it another way, until you are under the law, liable for all of the consequences of your actions you are not truely free because freedom implies a certain amount of responsibility. You are infact subject to your parents' whims to a certain extent. The way they raise you is their responsibility/problem, but make no mistake you are not free. John Locke really does a much better job than me explaining this. You might look at his Second Treatise.
Actually history says that the US Dems are very "regulation" friendly, here's examples just from recent history
1) Tipper Gore & music
2) CDA
3) COPA (Son of CDA)
4) Hillary Clinton's current violent gaming regulation proposals
Company Tax hasn't changed.
We now have a set of Taxes everytime we step on an aeroplane
Checked the cost of phone line rental recently? It's gone from $11 to $25 per month over the lat 5 years. This means that (thanks to the GST) there's a 100% increase in tax revenue (20% per year) for that single item alone. And we were told that the GST would lower the cost of services.
Given the 100% or higher increases in land and homes over the last few years (for example, in 1997 you could buy a 4 bedroom house on half an acre in Naranderra for between 60 and 70 thousand dollars. You'll pay $300,000 now) there's a further increase in tax (thanks to the GST) that's quite huge.
I don't buy the "It's the States fault arguement myself". How come in the pre-GST years of Labor Goverened Queensland they still had the high quality free-as-in-beer hospitals, yet now you go to a public hospital in Queensland if you don't mind a dose of MRSA or some untrained drug-fucked quack removing the wrong organs ( Hi Dr Patel! Killed many more patients recently?).
The fact is that revenue from taxation has grown far faster than either the general economy OR the CPI. The % of each dollar traded that ends up back to Treasury is at record levels. Afdter all, if there has been little significant decrease in spending, how do you get surpluses in the order of 10 to 15 billion dollars per year unless taxation revenue has increased?
I appreciate your comment about "blind fanatical hatred". But I assure you, this is fanatical hatred with eyes wide open. I see where this country's going under the Bush/Howard government, and "I don't like it" (Hi Pauline!). I don't like what my kids will have to put up with unless the trend changes back to a caring, compassionate society.