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This is an attack on freedom of speech
Freedom of speech, either good or bad, is the cornerstone of a our democracy. Destroy that and you destroy the very foundation this great country was built upon.
Posted by Agotz / 10 Dec 2008 8:48pm / Permalink
This filtering proposal is an assault on the civil liberties of Australians. It should not proceed.
Posted by concernedcitizen / 10 Dec 2008 6:24pm / Permalink
How ironical. I can submit a comment on your blog from China.
Posted by Markus / 10 Dec 2008 9:00pm / Permalink
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. In this context, claims that the Government's policy is analogous to the approach taken by countries such as Iran, China and Saudi Arabia are not justified.
Australian society has always accepted that there is some material which is not acceptable, particularly for children. That is why we have the National Classification Scheme for classifying films, computer games, publications and online content. Australian ISPs are already subject to regulation that prohibits the hosting of certain material based upon the Scheme. For many years, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has had the power to issue a 'take-down' notice requiring that prohibited content hosted in Australia be removed, blocked from public access or hosted from behind a restricted access system, depending on the content involved. All the Government is now seeking to do is to examine how technology can assist in filtering internationally-hosted content.
Stephen Conroy
Return to the Promoting a Civil and Confident Online Society blog topic or see other responses:
Why aren’t PC-level filters sufficient?- How will the blacklist be maintained?
- Why won’t the Government publish what is included in the ACMA blacklist?
- How does ACMA determine what sites will be included on the blacklist?
- Hasn’t the Government already undertaken a trial of the technical issues surrounding internet filtering? Didn’t this trial find that filtering was not effective?
- Won’t internet filtering reduce internet speeds?
- Internet filtering won’t stop peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic—so why bother?
- So what else is the Government doing to help protect children online?