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Australia's ISPs Speak Out Against Filtering
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."
maybe i'm wrong, and Australians are more receptive to the voice of reason than Americans are. but then again, a rational society would not be facing this dilemma, since they wouldn't put anyone in power who'd even be considering this kind of nationwide internet censorship. i mean, the Chinese at least have an excuse since they don't really elect their government officials. but Australia?
Unfortunately, America doesn't have a total monopoly on stupidity. Australia didn't really have much choice at the last election. The incumbent Prime Minister was an outright fascist who was so in love with himself that he refused to accept the value of anyone else's point of view, and his replacement is an insufferable narrow-minded suburban prig with as much imagination as one might expect from the glorified parking attendant that he is.
Sure, the Prime Minister's office will no doubt spin this any way it likes, but when it comes down to it, the policy is still driven by the so-called "moral panic" imperative. We never voted for internet censorship (that idea wasn't mentioned in the run-up to the election) but that won't stop them trying to get it through.
The silver lining is that they have to sweet-talk a lot of MPs to get the policy through Parliament, so there's hope that they might still get the kick in the pants that they deserve.