Yrps

On the topic of Internet censorship... I would like to explain to you the technical issues that your proposal faces, how we could better protect children when they use the Internet, how to better prevent child pornography and express my disgust at state censorship. The Internet and World Wide Web are different things. The Internet is a 'network of networks'. Private corporations such as telecommunications companies usually own these computer networks. We are all able to share data across the globe because these network owners allow data from other networks to traverse their own (at a cost) without interfering with or disallowing any particular data. On the other hand the World Wide Web is a term used to describe the collection of websites that are hosted on computers that are connected to the Internet. Web browsers are used to view these websites and communicate using the HTTP protocol, which is what I understand that which your proposal will attempt to filter. The major problem with your proposal is that it concerns only filtering the HTTP traffic on Australian ISPs and not other Internet communications. It therefore does not prevent the dissemination of unwanted content in the slightest. Peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, secure web proxies and a whole plethora of other protocols designed to move data around on the Internet are not included in your proposal and it would be infeasible to try and monitor and block these protocols anyway. This issue alone should prevent anyone from contemplating spending taxpayers; money on such a ludicrous scheme. Another problem with your proposal is that even to filter WWW traffic effectively is almost impossible. Domain names and IP addresses can be changed quickly allowing purveyors of unwanted content to bypasses your URL blacklists. Content scanning would be impossible especially on secured HTTP connections (such as those used for Internet banking). Any attempt to filter WWW traffic at all will result in reduced performance for Internet users. You should already have been made aware of the above by your technical advisors and be aware of how ineffective filtering software is since your NetAlert scheme had such a poor uptake and was easily subverted, even by adolescent children. If parents are truly concerned with what their children view on the WWW then they need to parent them. They might wish to consider only allowing their children to surf the web in a common part of the home or installing client-side filtering software on their own computers. A nanny state is something we do not need and I am a firm believer in personal responsibility. Parents must take responsibility for the upbringing of their children and not rely on technology to do it for them. State censorship is so offensive to the idea of a free and democratic country that to entertain the idea of implementing something akin to the Great Firewall of Australia should make you feel ashamed. If any filtering is to take place it should be done on an opt-in basis only and not be mandatory. When the Australian government puts forward proposals such as this filtering scheme I wonder if Australia requires something along the lines of a Bill of Rights to protect the freedoms we currently enjoy in our democratic nation. If the government does infringe on the rights of the Australian people in the manner you have set out in your scheme our country will become the laughing stock of the global community. We could better stop child pornography by employing, training, equipping and supporting police officers that can investigate such things. Turning to software vendors and trying to use technology to solve a societal problem is illogical. The only winners will be the software vendors&; shareholders. I implore you to listen to the doubts raised by experts about the effectiveness of such a filtering system and to also consider the moral implications of imposing mandatory state censorship. Instead of wasting time on this Internet filtering scheme your ministry should be using government resources to improve Internet performance in Australia and further enabling e-commerce. The Labor government will not have my vote at the next election if this censorship scheme is implemented. Yours faithfully, Yrps.