Australia ‘voluntary mandatory’ Net censorship
p2pnet news view | P2P | Politics:- With communications minister Stephen Conroy taking much of the heat, Australian leader Kevin Rudd has been fighting grimly to impose China-like online censorship against the crystal clear wishes of the Australian people.
As the thin end of what would inevitably become an enormous wage, he’s drawn up a blacklist of sites he and his friends want to ‘filter’ having decided they’re unfit for viewing by the general population.
However, “Responding to questions from shadow communications minister Nick Minchin [right] on how the government may go about imposing the internet filtering scheme, Senator Conroy said that legislation may not be required and ISPs may adopt an industry consensus to block restricted content on a voluntary basis,” says Australian IT.
But, voluntary mandatory system? What voluntary mandatory system? – wondered Minchin, according to the story.
Conroy’s response?
Well, “they could agree to all introduce it”.
Rudd, et al, are urrently spending around $300,000 on an industry filtering trial involving nine internet providers, says the story, continuing »»»
[...] a spokesman for Senator Conroy said that the department was not allowed to reveal how many subscribers had participated in the trial due to terms of its agreement with the participating ISPs. He referred to previous statements affirming that the outcome of the trial would not be affected by the number of participants.
“The trial is examining different filtering technologies in a live internet environment. In particular, Enex Testlab will assess the performance of the filter on internet speeds. A scalability assessment will also be undertaken to assess the impact of the filtering solution on internet access speeds with higher levels of traffic and customers,” the spokesman said.
He refused to clarify the minister’s comments when asked whether the Labor government was prepared to accept a voluntary ISP-level internet filtering scheme.
The committee, “was also told that the department had recently agreed to give internet provider Primus around $14,300 to purchase equipment that would help test how the filter would perform when large numbers of customers were involved,” Australian IT adds.
Australian IT - Net filtering may not be mandatory, May 26, 2009
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May 29th, 2009 at 3:09 am
Kinda like what we have in Finland. And a court just decided that once you have been blacklisted you may not even complain to the courts about it since “SHHHH IT’S A SECRET”. So your ass is grass if you end up on that list at the moment. Hopefully the higher courts throw the list away and just trust it people. Oh yeah they voted this list in under the kiddeporn guise. And wikileaks has the complete list. So secret.