Boris

I'm still trying to work out whether this whole "digital economy blog" debacle is comedy or tragedy. On one hand it's funny because of the staggering cluelessness, on the other hand it's tragic because it reveals just how little Minister Conroy cares about the quality of his policy.

I wasn't going to bother commenting. I know that you'll never read my post and that it'll just get lost among the hundreds of others all saying the same thing, but I'm here because the "answers" you have given to previous comments have made me really angry. Let's just look at a couple of them.

"As we have said in our main post, the Government does not view the ISP filtering debate as an argument about freedom of speech.

Freedom of speech is fundamentally important in a democratic society and there was never any suggestion that the Australian Government would seek to block political content."

Maybe you're not suggesting it, now. But parliamentarians are already calling for things like gambling sites and legal pornography to be blocked. Portrayals of political corruption are already part of the OFLC censorship criteria for an R rating. The copyright industry would love to have more control over the Internet, and they will start lobbying within 24 hours of the filter starting. I could go on, and your public statements about blocking "inappropriate" content are not helpful in clearing up the questions here.

Sure, ConroyFilter v1.0 may not block these but there is no guarantee that v2.0 will not. This is a policy direction that anyone who cares about freedom of speech needs to kill before it takes root.

In "Why aren’t PC-level filters sufficient?" you say "We understand that ISP filtering is not a 'silver bullet' for this purpose."

Great, thanks. Now explain why, considering that all of the evidence points to the filters being trivial to bypass (what, are you going to block every open proxy on Earth? Do you even understand what that means?), slowing the internet down, costing money, etc etc, the cost/benefit analysis still tells you that filtering is a good idea.

The best part of this is thinking about how much fun the bureaucrats in your department must have going through hundreds and hundreds of comments all saying basically the same thing. They must be laughing quietly to themselves as they page through the acres of furious nerd rage.

PS this comments form desperately needs a "preview" function so I can see whether my HTML tags are working.