If you’re an Australian visitor to this website, you will probably already have heard about the Australian Government’s decision to introduce a mandatory ISP (Internet Service Provider) level filter. The problem is, if you’re not a tech enthusiast, you’ve probably never heard of it, and won’t until you’re affected by it.
The filter is designed to block any access to any material the government deems ‘inappropriate’, to any computer connected to the internet in Australia, without any option to ‘opt-out’. Such content would have to be assumed to be related to child pornography, sexual violence and crime related activity.
The problem with this mandatory filter is that, whilst it has already planned to introduce this filter, there are very few points of official information available. What content would be deemed ‘inappropriate’? Who would decide what content falls under this definition, and therefore be blocked? And, how far could the government really go with blocking access to information they do not want Australian’s to know about?
Sure, the worries about another Chinese incident, where the government has attempted to block access to any of their bad past (see wikipedia), are probably just exaggerated, but with so little information do you really blame the community for feeling this way?
And it’s also disturbing to read of some reports that “showed that the filters "over-blocked" up to 3.4% of sites that were not intended to be filtered, and that high volume sites would likely cause the filters to fail” (carlos computers blog). But again, whilst these reports may be overly exaggerated, with so little information available, who wouldn’t think that?
I support any initiative that stops access to socially-unaccepted material, especially child pornography. Though, my worries are that whilst this system may block access to these websites, the cost both financially and physically to our equipment may not bring any result, considering that there are many other ways of obtaining such material. My main concern? Users viewing such material may resort to sexually assaulting a child, to fill in the need for them to see such disgusting material.
If the filter goes ahead, there needs to be an ‘opt-out’ feature; but even then, doesn’t it defeat the purpose? What are your views on the filter?
Tags: australia, filtering, government, internet
I couldn’t agree more, Michael. When I was at school there was something that was implemented along the same lines, basically blocking out sites that weren’t school related. It was very frustrating because a lot of sites, the DET may not have seemed useful for teaching the students, but were still very useful to us and did help a lot. I’m still convinced that more time was actually wasted getting around that firewall to play games than would’ve been spent playing games.
P.S Love the site and portfolio! Looks great!
Ashton,
Firstly, thanks for the great comments.
You make an interesting point – and one that I have been thinking about for the past few weeks. I’ve just started University, and it’s a complete contrast of school in terms of their internet filtering.
My university imposes no download limit, and there is very little blocked what so ever. But it’s interesting to see, whilst the first two or so days were filled with excitement that we could download massive amounts of stuff, in the end after a week it’s been completely forgotten, and there’s no interest at all.
Of course, this is different to the sorts of sites we would want blocked Australia-wide. However, I still beg the question of if it will actually work without other major ramifications.
[...] you read my blog post earlier this year, ‘Australian Government’s Plan to Introduce a Mandatory Internet Filter’, you should be aware of the internet filter that the current government, and in particular [...]