Australian Govt to Censor Internet

Duncan Riley at TechCrunch has a most disturbing report about the Australian government imposing censorship on Internet content.  This puts them in the same camp as China and it just doesn't seem like something your would expect from a country with a reputation for freedom and independence.

The incumbent Labor Party is doing it, of course for noble reasons: To protect children.  Governments always seem to have noble reasons for taking people's liberty away.

Comments

[Douglas Karr]

The terrible part of this is that modern day routers already offer the filtering capabilities that these politicians are looking to do at a national level. As well, the people who wish to bypass this can do it quite simply with the use of proxy servers and P2P technologies.

It truly shows how ignorant public officials are of technology. It's really about time that countries began adding the 'Secretary of Technology' so they could teach these poor ol' saps a thing or two.

[Stephen Collins]

This is such a terrible decision, not because of the censorship aspects, which are scary enough, but because of the huge gap in understanding it illustrates. Either very bad advice is being given or it's political expediency of the worst sort.

I've discussed the futility of this exercise at length at my own blog - http://www.acidlabs.org/2008/01/01/dumb-decision-by-our-new-government-over-net-filtering/