Australia to Censor The Internet
Australia has just announced that it will proceed with controversial plans to censor the Internet after Government commissioned trials found that the filtering and blacklisting of banned sites was accurate and would not slow down the Internet.
Why on earth would a western nation impose strict Internet filters? Possibly one of 2 reason…actually I’m sure it’s both.
- These politicians have no idea on the notion of freedom without bounds
- These same politicians are uneducated and sadly misinformed on the adverse affects to the community
Sure I get it, we need to protect minors from harmful material such as child pornography…that’s clearly obvious. But these things have already been implemented by the Internets biggest players. All major search engines exclude such content from their indexes. Further, home PC software and browsers have built in features to prevent such explicit material being accessed in the first place.
The Australian government by moving to a mandatory ISP filtering regime has opened up the ability for them to go beyond such material and censor content which would otherwise be useful. This has to raise concerns to all Internet community members not just in Australia but from around the world.
What Australian politician have demonstrated here is their inability to think beyond the horizon and consider what such a move will mean in future. We will be restricting access to socially and politically controversial material on the Internet….so What? The Internet was designed for this. Take for example, information on how to overcome drug addition, euthanasia, access to gay and lesbian rights…controversial yes, should be restricted?..NO!
A pole run by the Sydney Morning Herald had over 20,000 respondents. 96% disapprove of the proposed changes. Hardly a surprise.