Lexi Belle

I am for net censorship, or rather moderation or filtering. I think censorship is the wrong word. I don't believe that any medium for communication should be anarchistic. Just as we need laws to protect us in existing forms of media, eg. radio, TV, print, we need them for the internet. I can see where Labor is coming from in relation to moderating the internet and the future digital economy. If we are going to depend on the internet that greatly, then yes, there should be some degree of policing, to protect our personal and business interests. Now before everyone jumps up and says that the technology wont work; I would have to disagree. There are various vendors that have carrier grade hardware capable of filtering content up to 10Gbps per unit. In fact such an architecture is widely deployed in any telco's core network architecture as part of their value-add services gateway - its mandatory these days. The transmission capacity is also immense, we are talking Tbits and up. Given that NBN will only be 24Mbps and ADSL2+ technology, there will only be marginal effect on the latency as a result of the net filter. What will be the factor would be the response time for overseas servers we are trying to access. For local traffic, this would hardly be an issue. From a cost/benefit point of view, I think the filter is essential. The point that many of those who are against censorship conveniently ignore is that although the filter cannot block out every bit of illegal or undesirable activity, it will block a very significant amount of it, making it safe to use in the digital economy. It will also not affect internet speed by any signficiant degree. Another point is equating this with some kind of totaliatrian plot by the government to control and inhibit freedom of speech. This is such a load of rubbish. We do have freedom of speech, but it is a right that is enacted within the laws of our society, and the internet should mirror these laws. There should not be a separate law for the internet. To say that censoring the internet is putting a gag of free speech is simply incorrect and are the belief of those who think the internet should be lawless. If that were the case, there would be many victims of this digital frontier, if they so choose to participate in it, and I dont see why the internet should be the domain of tech savvy geeks alone.