Shane

I can understand the need to protect children from the sexual predators on the internet, from inappropriate content and from the horrific abuse of being dragged into child pornography.

I am employed in one of the Department of Education colleges who have a duty of care to provide this filtering to all of its students (and staff get this too to some lesser degree).

Even with a lot of human resources and expert contractors dedicated to this function, I could not advise that this is a complete success.

I hear complaints frequently about harmless sites being blocked, along with the problem existing that it does not censor all inappropriate sites.

Our judicial system was based on better than 100 people guilty of a crime to go free than a single person getting convicted for a crime they never committed.

If you use this logical basis on which our judicial system has long been based on, then mandatory filtering is wrong.

I agree with the small number of sites blocked, but I think that ISP's should report to the relevant police authorities, when a user accesses one of these specific sites of concern for further investigation.

I to some extent fully support censorship in general, provided that the goal is to protect society and that the censorship is accurate or extremely effective.

If there was a magical system that could perform the censorship of inappropriate content for children (and perhaps adults as well - sites about crime, bomb making come to mind here) and it did not block valid sites then I would be all for it. We already censor TV, magazines and videos already (with ratings and some material being rejected when it is too obscene). The internet should not be excluded from this.

The internet use to be a academia universe. With the comercialisation came all the spam, scams, phishing, popups, spyware and other nasty stuff. Purists that all content on the internet must be available have got to get their head out of the sand.

Obviously I cannot agree with countries like Vietnam and China who censor anti-government sites. This takes protection too far when it is purely political protection. Focusing on crime and valid site lists that are checked and reviewed by a human with open and reviewed criteria is common sense.