Land down underBig boost for the Great Aussie Firewall
Australia’s Labor government wants to make the Internet cleaner and safer; to do that, the government last year introduced a proposal for a filtering scheme — dubbed the Great Aussie Firewall — which would block sites on an existing blacklist determined by the Australian Communications Media Authority; the project has just received a big boost
They call it the Great Aussie Firewall — A proposed Internet filter which promises to make Australia one of the strictest Internet regulators among democratic countries. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy proposed the filter in early 2008, following up on a promise of the Labor Party government to make the Internet cleaner and safer. The plan, which would have to be approved by Parliament, has two tiers. A mandatory filter would block sites on an existing blacklist determined by the Australian Communications Media Authority. An optional filter would block adult content.
This controversial — take that back: this very controversial — scheme has seen its political fortunes rise and fall. It has now received a big boost when, the other day, Australia’s second largest ISP Optus agreed to join the pilot. The testing of filtering technology has suffered credibility problems since the refusal of iiNet to take part, after it was unable to reconcile the trial with its opposition to censorship. iiNet said the proposed blacklist of unwanted material was much wider than just child sex abuse images.
John Oates writes that last month the scheme suffered another blow when the list leaked and it was shown to include poker sites, fetish and religious sites, Wikipedia pages, and the Web site for a Queensland dentist.
Gaffe-prone communications minister Stephen Conroy said Optus’s decision would help the government obtain “robust results” from the pilot. Conroy also said the government is working with incumbent telco Telstra — not on actual customer-facing trials, but on other ISP filtering technology. This is not part of the official pilot but will influence policy.
The Aussie government effectively wants two levels of control over online content — one to restrict “unwanted material,” which it says is content that would be refused a classification, and one for a child-friendly Internet which families could sign up for.
Optus joins seven other ISPs — Primus Telecommunications, Highway 1, Nelson Bay Online, Netforce, OMNIconnect, TECH 2U, and Webshield.
HS Daily Wire will publish Australian Technology and Innovation Special Report in June 2009; for more information contact Cindy Whitman at cwhitman@hsdailywire.com
