Call for Aussie anti-porn block
p2p news / p2pnet: Australia’s Labor opposition party wants an official system which would force ISPs to, "block violent and pornographic material before it reached home computers," says the Australian Associated Press.
But the government and ISPs aren’t so keen.
"Under the ‘clean feed’ system, pioneered in Britain, users would be unable to access any content banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) because it contained graphic sexual or violent material, rated R or higher," says the story, quoting Labor leader Kim Beazley as saying all households would be included unless they opted out.
At the moment, ISPs offer subscribers, "cheap or free filter software for their own computers" but, "The reality is that cost and poor computer literacy mean almost two-thirds of parents don’t have internet filters on their family computers," according to Beazley.
Communications minister Helen Coonan said PC-based internet filters, which ISPs must offer to subscribers at a cheap price, were better and had been taken up by more than one in three families using the net.
But the current system, with three enforceable codes of practice, is world-class, the AAP has Internet Industry Association executive director Peter Coroneos saying.
"A family who takes advantage of (filter programs) will have a far greater degree of confidence in limiting the kind of material their children are likely to access than would occur if we adopt the limited clean feed model."
Coroneos said the problem, "lay in educating parents and teachers about the use of filter systems".
"The ACMA is currently auditing the top 25 ISPs, which cover about 95 per cent of internet users in Australia, for compliance with the codes of practice," adds the story. "Any ISPs found in breach of the codes could face fines of up to $27,500 a day."
Also See:
Australian Associated Press – Labor will make ISPs filter porn on Net, March 21, 2006
March 21st, 2006 at 8:23 pm
“The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.” –John Gilmore, Founding Member of the EFF.
Will Government policy wonks ever learn?
March 21st, 2006 at 10:44 pm
I doubt Kim Beezley has ever even turned on a computer and the really really really sad part is that this is our quality of opposition leader…. As much as anyone I hate John Howard and the liberals with avengence and I would never vote for them but the Labour party really needs to get its shit together if they want to have any chance at the next election – seriously – heres what an EFA discussion list is saying about the proposal:
“If it’s an opt-in scheme, will the ISP be obliged to keep a record of a user’s agreement to opt-in? If so, what will stop that list being leaked to the tabloids? Obviously, privacy is a massive issue when one has to sign a form asking to be “allowed” to download porn.”
And here’s what the governments saying in response:
“According to research conducted by the Government’s Internet safety organisation NetAlert, the kind of server-based filtering proposed by Labor has been found to have a major adverse impact on network performance.
The NetAlert trial was conducted by researchers from RMIT as part of the Government-funded Launceston Broadband Program, in partnership with ACMA and with the assistance of Telstra. The final report will be released shortly but the preliminary findings of the trial include that:
- All server-level filters tested had a major impact on network performance ranging from an 18 per cent degradation for the best performing filter to 78 per cent on the worst performing; and
- The server-level filters perform adequately at slower speeds, for the faster upstream connections that are common in larger ISPs, the performance degraded significantly.
“A previous Government review into the filtering technology that is the basis of Labor’s plan also found that it would involve implementation costs of around $45 million and ongoing costs of more than $33 million per annum for ISPs for questionable benefit,” Senator Coonan said.
Try again Kim………
March 22nd, 2006 at 3:29 am
Take away porn… and the internet becomes useless… -_-