James Fleming

I'm yet another would-be entrepreneur, using the web as my medium of business.

Because I haven't been able to get any assurances from Minister Conroy's office about what content would be acceptable within Australia (and this was well before any filtering was mentioned), I'm hosting all my services offshore.

What do I need to operate onshore? Assurance that it's safe for me, as a businessman, to operate a commercial enterprise on a server within Australia. I'm not in the porn industry, and have no intention of doing so. However, I'm not willing to take the risk of being arbitrarily censored or shut down.

The only "clean feed" that's going to benefit Australia is one that's free of tampering, however good the intentions, and however bombastic the supporting rhetoric. If the government is serious about tackling crimes enabled by the internet, then the sanest approach is to *use* the medium and the information it provides to track down the criminals and use the existing powers to deal with them.

Censorship benefits nobody. The most positive move that Mr Conroy's office could make at this point is to publicly apologise, abandon all plans to censor Australian internet access - and follow up by repealing the existing censor-the-internet legislation introduced by Helen Coonan.

What's been particularly damaging to Mr Conroy's plan has been the blatant dishonesty and bait-and-switch tactics. Is it about the children? No, wait, it's about illegal content. Now it's about "objectionable" content, with no reference to who is to regard it as objectionable. Then there's the suspicious timing of the lawsuit brought against the ISP who's made a point of their opposition to the scheme. It has many of us wondering what persuasion the RIAA and MPAA have applied to Mr Conroy.

It also leaves me puzzled as to how this might benefit the real victims of child porn: the children used to *produce* it. How does it help them, to hide what's being done to them?

Pressing ahead with a regime of censorship will merely drive (more) business offshore. What would be much more constructive is to understand that it's a medium of communication used by a very wide variety of interests, and to facilitiate that communication.

I'm totally in favour of making filtering software available to those who wish to avail themselves of it - as has already been done. If the uptake has been disappointingly low, then a reasonable conclusion is that the desire for censorship in this country is correspondingly low.

I'd actually be interested in filtering that could accurately block child porn without any false positives, but for two minor issues: first, I haven't encountered any in the 16 years I've been using the internet, and second, I know that it's such an intractible problem as to be effectively impossible.

Mr Conroy, please remember that the government is supposed to *serve* the people, not *rule* them.

Personally, I don't want to be stifled by those who fear freedom. I don't want a nanny state; I want the freedom to be hurt, because stopping people from doing stupid things will also stop them from doing unexpectedly clever things. Mme Curie's example comes to mind - we'd never have gotten the medical benefits that we have from our understanding of radiation, if she'd been prevented from hurting herself in the course of learning about it.