Simon

>The facts are here: Millions of Internet users in the UK, Canada, Scandinavia, Switzerland and New Zealand have their internet filtered for illegal child sexual abuse Web sites and their Internet does not slow down and they don't notice it.

These filters are applied optionally by ISPs themselves. They are completely different from the proposed Australian filter. You say they don't notice it but recently the Internet Watch Foundation blacklist, which these filters apply, blocked a Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer - an album which can be bought from amazon.com) which caused the entire UK to be unable to edit Wikipedia. The image on the site was not blocked, just the page itself. As unacceptable as you may find the album cover that the text of the page was blocked shows how dangerous these filters are.

>What is wrong with Australian ISPs - can't they look beyond their own shores and see what the world is doing? Go for filtering of illegal sites for everyone, and if they don't like the other type of filtering for unwanted content, then they can always opt out - so what's the problem?

The problem is with defining what is illegal content. That is a job for the courts, not an unaccountable black box between our internet and the rest of the world.

The filter wont stop child pornography and it wont stop child pornography from being made. Not even China's firewall can do that.

Although I realize it currently does, our government should not have the power to censor ideas.