Australia Waters Down, Delays Internet Filter Policy

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Australia's government is running a bit scared of a population enraged by its controversial mandatory filtering project. The Government today announced a suite of measures designed to provide controls around the filter project, including independent oversight and a review of content which would be included. In addition, some Australian ISPs will voluntarily censor any child pornography URLs. But the whole project is still going ahead — it's just been delayed and slightly modified."

Comments

Next election will be crucial

[MichaelSmith]

I plan to put all Labour senators last, and to put the Greens ahead of labour in the lower house.

Re:Next election will be crucial

[CoolGopher]

It would be an even stronger statement to only put Conroy last, not all of the Labor candidates. That way there is no doubt whatsoever what you're voting against.

Re:Next election will be crucial

[BluBrick]

Problem is it's not his personal policy, he's just driving ALP policy. Boot him out and the party just grows another arsehole to take his place and enact their policy.

Re:Next election will be crucial

[MichaelSmith]

Yeah but if Gillard realises Conroy is poison she will keep clear.

Re:Next election will be crucial

[QuantumG]

Who ya gunna put first? It's not like Liberal has a different policy on the filter.

Re:Next election will be crucial

[CoolGopher]

Maybe, though that is open for debate.

However, if people who are voting e.g. Greens are also putting Conroy last - that will definitely make the Labor strategists take note (and hopefully discard the policy altogether).

Don't be fooled

[dmiller]

The changes announced today seem to be little more than a delaying tactic to remove the issue of mandatory Internet censorship from the agenda ahead of the election that is expected to be announced any day now. This issue has turned quite toxic for the government; the people who are for it are only weakly so, but the people who are against it are furious and are already organising campaigns against the government on various social media.

I don't think the government can be trusted not to bring it back in a essentially unmodified form after the next election. Vote accordingly.

Re:Don't be fooled

[aussie_a]

So we have a choice between a censored internet or becoming slaves to corporate overlords. This is the issue with the two party system.

Mission succeeded

[Anonymous Coward]

You want to place restrictions on the internet, but you know people wont like it. Now - just place those restrictions is not going to work, because people would protest and you would have to remove everything.

What to do?

Well - Give a very harsh restricted policy and everybody jumps up and down and jells...

Now - water down a bit, and people are going to be happy and like you again. They have forgotten they did not want anything in the first place and are happy it turned out lighter than feared.

Result? You have your restrictions in place - with the strength you had originally planned without too much protest....

Mission succeeded indeed...

www.kiddiporn.com?

[gizmonty]

Child pornography URLs? Really?

The problem, I suspect, is Scope Creep

[igb]

The UK has an effective system which enjoys largely popular support. An independent organisation, with clear governance, provides a list of URLs that contain illegal content. Those URLs are blocked on a voluntary basis by consumer ISPs. The performance hit is a red herring: the technology used is two-stage, so only the IP numbers that are hosting the material are proxied (it's done by injecting local /32 routes to a transparent proxy, mostly). Although there's an iron fist in the velvet glove of voluntary filtering, in that government has threatened to legislate, in reality every ISP is on board. Business connections may or may not be so filtered.

There have been fuck-ups, most notably the Virgin Killer affair which (a) revealed that Wikipedia doesn't play nicely with ISP-level proxying and (b) there are edge-cases in the law on child porn. The argument that the record cover in question isn't child porn is weak, but the whole affair was mis-handled.

Is the system perfect? No. Because it was never intended to be. A proxy or an https tunnel or any number of other things will subvert it. The effect is more straight-forward: it removes the ``oh, I stumbled over it accidentally'' defence, and prevents pressure to impose filtering for anything other than illegality. In the grand British spirit of compromise (which tends not to sit well with the American desire for 100% legal clarity) it does a reasonable job reasonably, and if it lost public confidence it would rapidly have to adapt.

The Australian problem is that (a) it's being imposed by legislative fiat, rather than emerging from industry debate (the UK system arose from a couple of the major ISPs) (b) Australia has some states that are culturally conservative that the central government isn't prepared to overrule (a problem we don't have in the UK) and (c) there's a skein of support for strong censorship that neither the UK nor the US suffers from.

Re:It's voluntary filtering

[Anonymous Coward]

Sucks for people like some of my friends who have no alternatives to either Telstra or Optus cable.

Re:Everything happened just I have forseen

[QuantumG]

"Prime Minister Julia Gillard says she has no intention of pretending to believe in God to attract religiously-inclined voters."

Now if only she would denounce the filter she'd get my vote.

Re:All this filtering...

[smasha]

Why don't people in China and Australia just get Cheap Linux Servers in the US and just tunnel into them when they want to hit some blocked content? I use mine whenever I travel and/or use public wifi. Then I know anything I do on the web is encrypted until it his my server in NJ.

That is a valid way of bypassing the filter, but the main point is that we shouldn't have to resort to anything like that to be able to view the internet uncensored.

Re:It's voluntary filtering

[c0lo]

But customer of both Optus and Telstra will be unable to opt-out.

that is not true ... they CAN go somewhere else.

Like what? Take their home and leave the community? (fyi: that's the only downside in my eyes of the area I'm living: everything in communications is Telstra only - the only wire is Telstra's optical fiber, no mobile but Telstra's has coverage. Cannot install a satellite dish - would cast a shadow on my solar panels).

Re:Thanks to people

[Crypto Gnome]

NO!

And let me say again NO! You are 100% entirely wrong ,sir.

If you see a man being beaten to death by the side of the road, do you

1. turn your head and ignore the *blindingly obvious evidence* or
2. DO SOMETHING (eg call the police)?

"Filtering" the internet actually encourages child abuse and paedophilia, because it shows YOU DO NOT WANT TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM, you just want to pretend that it doesn't happen.