Greg Hutchison

Welcome to the world of the web. Its been around for a while. We use it mostly wisely. We research, we read, we pay our bills, we invest in stocks (and lose our dollars). Its very useful. We sometimes look at things we shouldn't, but overall its very useful. We also send emails to our pollies complaining about this and that. They rarely listen, and they mostly write back by snail mail. Funny that. Getting pollies to use email and blogs like this would be good; a big advance. NBN yes loverly, but they'll still send snail mail. I did have one ACT pollie actually write a letter, sign it, pdf it and email it. Now thats progress! An NBN will be fine; but actually we have lots of it already. Fibre does get out there to many places already; its more a matter of using it wisely and working with the big T. They have many nodes out there. They are called RIMS and CMuxes. Sure mot the best but the concept is there. The proposed filter of Sen Conroy is an issue for you. We don't generally have censorship in this country (am I kidding myself). Do we really want it. Sure we don't want child pornography but as others have stated, those in that area area will use alternative technology. More sophisticated P2P and torrents are available and getting more sophisticated. Essentially they could soon be unfilterable. A filter based on web addresses; well is it really going to work. Is it going to slow the net. It will not slow the links but overall performance may be effected if www traffic has to be directed through central servers. This is like adding another DNS level. You need to think this through carefully. There is a big issue with fast internet and it has the propensity to be a wopper. As you should know 60-70% of net traffic is music/video download. Mostly through p2p and more now using torrents. Many state its all pirate traffic downloading copied CDs and DVDs or movies. Maybe so, but many download TV series that are available in US but not in AUS. Some say its pirate but its been broadcast publically in US or UK. In the past if you could not watch something live the TVs stations would actually tell you to video tape it late at night and get someone else to do it. Download TV shows seems similar to this to me. Anyway you need to come to terms with fast broadband and the ease of download of all kinds of things many nominally illegal or pirated. And a lot of this will be encrypted. Welcome to the world of conflicts, inconsistencies, rapid change and new thinking. Lest see what Barnaby Joyce thinks!