Jaimes

As an Australian and an internet user, I have serious concerns about your new mandatory "clean feed" filter initiative. Given the importance your Government has attached to modernising Australia's broadband network, pursuing a policy that can only slow down and increase the costs of home internet access seems misguided at best. Australian households are diverse, and most do not have young children, so mandating a one-size-fits-all approach will not serve the public well. I don't think it is the Government's role to decide what's appropriate for me or my children, and neither do most Australians. Given the amount of Internet content available, the Government will never be able to classify it all and I feel that the time and money could be spent in better ways both to protect children and improve Australia's digital infrastructure. Australian parents need better education about the risks their children face online. Trying to rid the Internet of adult content is futile, and can only distract from that mission. A few points to consider 1. How will this filter serve any purpose for blocking child pornography or other illegal content when surely if any illegal content is found the proper authority's would be notified to have those websites taken down. 2. How will this filter even attempt to prevent online predators from contacting children? Will you be blocking social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook aswell as chat rooms where these predators are known to go to engage children? 3. Implementing this filter will give parents a false sense of security that their children are now safe on the Internet because of the filter. Opening up the gateway to lawsuits when it doesn't properly filter some webpages. 4. It should be up to parents to decide what's best for their children just as they would when they decide what movies and television they watch. It's not the governments role to play "Nanny State". 5. In a supposedly free and democratic society how can you justify blocking or censoring adult content from adults? Also how can you do something as completely undemocratic as block sites you deem as "unwanted material" without giving the public any indication as to what this unwanted material is instead keeping it hidden in a secret blacklist with no publicly available record where you can continue to add anything else to the list you deem unwanted without the public ever knowing what is being blocked? I wonder if negative comments about polices such as this would be classified by you as unwanted material. 6. The filter would incorrectly block 10,000 legitimate sites in every million. 7. When we have a filter like this where countries like Iran have more Internet freedom how can we any longer take the moral high ground and be an example to other nations as what a free and democratic society should be. 8. This filter will slow Internet access down by up to 80% according to a Government report. Our country already has just about the worst Internet speeds in the world, why put another hurdle like this in front of us, which is going to seriously hamper us from ever being able to catch up with the Internet speeds of the modern world. 9. The filter can easily be bypassed making it effectively pointless. 10. Tax money would be much more efficiently and sensibly spent on going after these child abusers. 11. All the experts agree that this filter is stupid, flawed, won't work and will only slow Internet speeds down. 12. The Australian public have shown very little interest in this filter public with far more of the public feedback being against it. So how can you willingly force this upon the Australian people and expect us to pay for it? 13. Given the amount of disapproval this filter has why pursue it when this will almost guarantee your party will be a one term government when the people decide to vote you out at the next election. It seems to me the only reason you could have for pushing this policy is either you are seriously misguided, which I doubt because you have been given plenty of feedback by the public, the experts and the ISPs for why this filter is so impractical and insensible. So that means that the only conclusion that can be drawn is that you want this filter in place because of some ulterior agenda it serves. Lastly given all these points that you have not even began to address I find it deeply offensive and juvenile that you'd suggest that everyone against this filter supports child porn.