Another day, another its all about kiddie porn line from the censorship lovers, this time its Child Wise CEO Bernadette McMenamin in the Oz (link).
According to McMenamin
IT is beyond belief that some representatives of the Australian internet service provider industry are reluctant to install filters that would prevent access to child pornography.
Surely any decent person would do all they can to protect children. However there exists a small but vocal group in Australia which is opposed to the federal Government?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s proposal to introduce mandatory ISP filtering to block child pornography and other illegal content.
Notice once again that the backers keep talking about child pornography but not the actual plan, which is to block a whole lot more than that, and content outside of porn as well.
No reasonable or sane person believes in child pornography, but lets be very, very clear on this point: kiddie porn is ALREADY illegal to distribute and even view. If they know where this stuff is hosted, why wouldn’t the Government, in conjunction with overseas countries work to get it taken down and the sickos locked up (or castrated)?
Then there’s the other places argument
Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the United Kingdom have ISP-based filters in place blocking child pornography to the majority of Internet users in those countries. Reports show that these filters are very effective
Correct, but again, they block child porn only and I believe in the case of England we’re talking a couple of thousand websites, NOT millions as the Australian Government is proposing to block on anything and everything they deem we shouldn’t be viewing.
Small scale filtering works because the number of sites blocked is so small that it has no major affect of internet access speed, indeed implementing it would be fairly easy. Under the Australian Governments proposal our speeds would drop between 17% and 78% simply because every time you typed in a web address it would have to be checked against a database of millions of sites, not a short list as is the case in England.
I’m still very, very much against the current Government’s internet censorship proposal, but if it were a block kiddie porn only model I’d reconsider my opposition.
(thanks to Bryce for the link)
