Brad

Senator Conroy, you have been given the responsibility to improve this industry not drag it down further than it already is!

First, build a panel of experts, not bureaucrats who actually want to improve the industry not line their pockets!

Secondly, listen to the MAJORITY, you only have christian fundamentalist support for this filter as all they see is people arguing over blocking child porn which isn't even remotely close to the real issue here.

Industry experts globally have condemned your plan as costly, unintuitive and as a futile exercise. There is very good reason for this. Most of the content you need to block (child and animal porn) isn't available over a HTTP protocol, it is passed by direct file transfer, which can be encrypted and totally undetectable to any filter you may ever conceive.

You will drive people to using remote proxy servers, VPNs and RDP sessions to PCs and Servers in other countries, exposing people to greater insecurity as their bank details etc will be easily traced through these connections which are easily able to be configured by a 12 year old.

As someone who has used the internet for well over a decade for at least 2-3 hours per day, I have NEVER stumbled across child pornography ever.

The odd adult website or poker website comes up when you are already looking in shady corners of the internet, but if you are already dealing with those sorts of websites you are expecting to find such things.

Spend the money on something worthwhile like trying to catch the scum who trade in child pornography, not to treat innocent Australian's as a group of potential child abusers that need to be separated from this garbage.

This whole exercise is an insult to the way our tax dollars are spent, will increase our ISP costs, will slow down our internet speeds exponentially during peak times when the filtering servers cannot cope with the load and by far the worst: give the current government, acma and a private organisation the ability to SILENTLY filter content it disagrees with.

If you must proceed with the filter, legislate EXACTLY what is allowed to be filtered, ie: child porn, terrorist websites etc. In addition to making the full list of banned IP and URL addresses publicly available at any time for any Australian to review and question, as is our right!

You are in government because we put you there, not because it is your right to be there. Work choices killed the reign of Howard, I am certain that the Great Firewall of Australia's Censorship Government will be its downfall.