Lindsay Wu

Congratulations on the innovation of this forum - I look forward to these posts actually being read and addressed. The proposed compulsory ISP filter, unlike this forum, is a terrible idea. Apart from the obvious condescending attempt to decide what Australians are grown-up enough to see, this filter will be 100% inneffective at preventing child porn and "inappropriate" material. It will not prevent the peer to peer file sharing that we now know is the modus operandi of child abusers. It is easily avoided using freely available tools of the like used by Chinese, Iranian and Saudi dissidents (the only other nations where it is necessary to avoid such a draconian internet filter), which I can guarantee will be used en masse by internet users around Australia. Have a look at http://www.torproject.org/ as just one example of a way around an internet filter. It can, and will be, dowloaded in no time by millions of people. To see how an internet filter could go wrong, look at the story today of the entire United Kingdom being cut-off from uploading to all of wikipedia (an invaluable resource), after a picture of an album cover for a band featuring a prepubescenct girl was uploaded to just one wikipedia page. An internet filter will insult the intelligence of Australians, be completely ineffective, and worst of all, will slow down our already slow internet - apparently by as much as 86%! A plan to introduce this filter makes no sense whatsoever. It has zero support in the community. If it goes ahead, it will mock the government's claim to be interested in promoting Australia's digital future. Fast internet is essential to our future, but this is the sort of plan that goes well out of its way to slow down our internet, for no effective reason! I urge you to drop this plan, as if you don't feel the wrath of the community yet, I can guarantee you will feel the utter fury of 20 million Australians once our already slow internet is slowed even further by such a pointless, ineffective, and condescending plan. I urge you to drop this utterly stupid proposed internet filter plan as soon as possible, and instead spend the money on educating parents on how to keep the internet "safe" - by placing the family computer in the living room, and having an adult around.