Save The Australian Net

Regrettably the government have decided today that they will pursue online censorship in Australia via Internet filtering at the ISP level.  Whilst this sounds admirable – after all I don’t really want my kids looking at kiddie porn – in practice it is an issue for two reasons.

The first and most important is that this sort of filtering will be almost technically impossible to achieve accurately.  As one pundit pointed out, while the trial only generated a 3.4% false positive rate – in reality this will bar access to over 7 MILLION websites.  The likelihood is that we will need the increased speed of the NBN to counterbalance the slowdown from this filtering!

My second concern relates to handing any government in this day and age the ability to censor information sources.  With the doubts around the legitimacy of the war in Iraq – not to mention Climategate – I’m not sure I trust the motives of any government in denying access to the Internet.   Finally – any sixteen year old pimply kid who knows how to tune in to Channel BT and surf for porn will likely be able to bypass these filters quite easily.

So have your say.  GetUp have a petition going to give you the chance to have your say.  See below for details.