Thursday, November 20, 2008

Aussie Net filtering looms

From the Guardian:

"Won't somebody think of the children? This mantra is being used with great effect by the Australian government to increase its control over what Australians see, watch and do - all, ostensibly, in the name of protecting the nation's youth. And a scheme that amounts to censorship is coming closer: the government has said that it wants to start live trials of ISP-level content filtering before Christmas.

In January, the government annouunced its $A128.5m (£55.2m) Plan for Cyber-Safety - a content-filtering scheme based on the pre-election pledge of Kevin Rudd, who became prime minister last year. His plan follows the failure of the A$189m NetAlert scheme put in place by the government of John Howard, who was defeated in the last federal election."

Regular readers will know of my less-than-sympathetic views of this kind of filtering scheme.

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