http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/labor...949855875.html
This has made me really angry.
Australia tries to present itself to the rest of the world as a free, democratic, and unbiased nation. This really demonstrates how far that is from the truth.
Basically, the current (recently elected) government wants to enforce mandatory filtering of the internet. It plans to filter out pornography and "excessive" violence.
If you actually want access So sites that are in fact legal in their content (for example, porn involving consenting adults) then you will have to call up your ISP and "opt out".
However it looks likely from some other sources that whether you "opt out" or not, some things will still be filtered (things considered illegal).
So what will contitute porn or extreme violence?
Who will be keeping those who add sites to these filters honest? Ie not adding sites because of their religious/political/etc content?
If one "opts out" will their name be passed on to the government? Added to a list of perverts? Monitored to see what they need an uncensored internet for?
Will horror.com be banned for its "violent" content? :)
It is unlikely that the people of Australia will actually be allowed to know what sites are banned - already the government insists that ISP's block some usenet newsgroups, and it is illegal for the ISP to tell what groups are blocked. So we can't even assure ourselves that the things being blocked are the sort of things that the government say they will be blocking.
This really pisses me off - when we hear of countries restricting access to the internet, we tend to think of countries like China, etc. Communist countries or dictatorships that are known to restrict their people's freedom of speech. Australia up until now hasn't been considered one of those countries.
Well now it is.
Not to mention the fact that filtering on such a large and inclusive scale has to have an affect on the speed of internet connections/browsing. I mean, if every URL request has to be scanned by the ISP and then allowed or denied, this has to have some impact on network performance.
The thing is - I am not really interested in accessing porn. I would rather watch a horror film than pretty much anything else. But it is the principle of restriction of information and liberty that gets me.
What do others here think? Does the rest of the world see Australia as the sort of country that would do this sort of thing? Is it right?