Charlie

The starting point for ensuring that benefits of the digital economy are enjoyed by all Australians is committing to open access for all Australians. The current plans by the government to attempt to filter the Internet are a threat to this and should be abandoned. The most significant issue with the proposed scheme is one of principle: in a democratic nation, the government should not be responsible for mandatory filtering of “unwanted” sites from the public. The other main problem is that filtering schemes are technically and socially flawed, so are ineffective and therefore a waste of tax payer's money. The principle of free access to information is of immense importance in a free country such as Australia. It is already understood that activities such as viewing child pornography are illegal and that incidences are investigated by the police - and ethical people do not wish to access such content, but ethical people can also rightfully object to the government's plan to filter “other unwanted content” [1]. The comments earlier this year by the Prime Minister about Bill Henson's work, for example, illustrate that members of the public have differing views of what is appropriate and the government should not decide this for everybody. Another example includes terrorism: this is a prime political target for filtering, but will the government stop access to Hamas material, for example? Some identify Hamas as a terrorist group and others do not. There are already calls from Senator Fielding to include legal pornography and from Senator Xenophon to ban gambling sites. The prospect of an ever-widening scope for filtering rightfully makes the public wary of creating the infrastructure that will allow this in the future. Filtering is also fundamentally flawed in terms of its stated objective, which is protecting children. It is vital that parents supervise their children online, because filters will not be perfect (they will still let bad sites through) and because the most serious risks online are not from published content but from other users. These other users will communicate with children through chat and instant messaging software, which are not filtered, or through the interactive features of websites that are increasingly common. The Internet is as varied as the real world, and parents must supervise their children just as they do in the real world. In addition to the technical flaw of not filtering everything is the fact that some percentage of legitimate content will be blocked by dynamic filtering techniques. Will the government compensate businesses whose e-commerce websites are accidentally blocked? Clearly, filtering poses a risk to even innocent people. And if we consider those who want to access illegal content, we should note that even young teenagers posses the sophistication to bypass filters using proxies and other software. The government has offered filtering software for concerned parents via the website for some time, but there has been limited public interest, as noted even by Conroy himself [2]. The people of Australia have lived with the Internet in its current form for many years now and understand already how to remain safe online. [1] Senate transcript, 11-Nov-2008. [2] Colley, A. Costs threaten NetAlert. The Australian IT, 26-Feb-2008.