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Australia's ISPs Speak Out Against Filtering

Posted by Soulskill on from the is-it-possible-to-import-an-isp dept.

daria42 writes "The leaders of three of Australia's largest internet service providers — Telstra Media's Justin Milne, iiNet's Michael Malone and Internode's Simon Hackett — have, in video interviews with ZDNet.com.au over the past few months, detailed technical, legal and ethical reasons why ISP-level filtering won't work. Critics of the policy also say that users will have no way to know what's being filtered."

5 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. This government is really naive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    IaaA (I'm am an Australian)

    If they think they can start censoring things they don't want us to read using child pornography as an excuse, they're really underestimating our intelligence. Everybody knows why KRudd wants this, he has some really unpopular solutions to problems nobody cares about (or those that don't even exist). Who knows what the great firewall of Australia would filter out?

    Many technical users will bypass this in a matter of minutes. People should ask for a personal refunds from the morons who devised this scheme, taking back the tax money they wasted from their own pockets and giving it back to hardworking Australians.

  2. It will start with Child Porn... by Airw0lf · · Score: 5, Informative
    ...next it will be used to silence political dissent, and then the content cartel will lobby to block everything from torrent trackers to sites that about console homebrew software.

    Oh wait it's already happening - from TFA:

    Conroy's mandatory Internet filtering proposal caused a stir last week when it was revealed a member of his department had tried to censor severely critical comments made on the Whirlpool broadband forum by an Internode network engineer regarding the merits of ISP level filtering.

    1. Re:It will start with Child Porn... by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, what they want to ban is this:

      Publications that:
      (a) describe, depict, express or otherwise deal
      with matters of sex, drug misuse or addiction,
      crime, cruelty, violence or revolting or
      abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they
      offend against the standards of morality,
      decency and propriety generally accepted by
      reasonable adults to the extent that they
      should not be classified; or
      (b) describe or depict in a way that is likely to
      cause offence to a reasonable adult, a person
      who is, or appears to be, a child under 18
      (whether the person is engaged in sexual
      activity or not); or
      (c) promote, incite or instruct in matters of crime
      or violence

      The way that this is done with films, books, etc, is that everything must be reviewed before it can be made available to the public. Consider how fucked the internet would be if they applied that standard.

      --
      How we know is more important than what we know.
  3. Re:Wow.. by Jacques+Chester · · Score: 5, Informative

    Australia's constitution does not have an explicit guarantee of free speech. However in a series of cases starting in the 80s the High Court have found an 'implied right' to free political speech.

    The reasoning runs thus:
    * All Australians are guaranteed a right to vote in elections.
    * To vote in an election you need to be able to inform yourself.
    * In able to inform yourself you need to be able to freely discuss political matters.
    * Ergo, political speech is protected.

    This means that the whole project may be unconstitutional as any filter must necessarily cause false positives for political matters. If not, nothing stops websites from adding a "we hate the censorship laws and the ALP" statement to the footer of every page to force the matter.

    --

    Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.

  4. I mentioned this a few days ago. by kaos07 · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1012207&cid=25565869

    "Regarding the Australian filter, it doesn't look like it's going to happen.

    The Green party and the Liberal party are both going to block the legislation in the Upper House. Their numbers combined are enough to stop the bill from passing.

    http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/10/30/1224956188036.html

    The Greens don't get much of their other policies talked about very much, besides the environment, but they have the most pro-Slashdot internet platform out of any political party. By that I mean they support open standards, net-neutrality and internet freedom (no censorship). They also want the government to embrace open source and all government documents to saved in an open document standard."