Under the guise of protecting children from pornography, the Australian Labor Party wants to bar many sites to ADULTS. And you thought censorship on moral grounds was the preserve of the Christian Right! The truth is that the Left will seek kudos wherever it can find it -- regardless of any principle that they have claimed to support previously. Given the pressure from both the Left and Christian conservatives, the Australian Federal government is so far being fairly heroic in resisting the pressure for censorship but there are worrying signs:
"The federal Government is planning to bolster NetAlert, its online safety agency, and give the media regulator greater powers as pressure builds from Labor and its own backbench to curb online pornography. Communications and IT Minister Helen Coonan says, however, that calls from Labor and Coalition colleagues to force internet service providers to filter porn sites are misguided...
Opposition IT spokesman Stephen Conroy said Government research showed the blacklist ISP filtering system that Labor had proposed would have had minimal impact on network performance. "In 2004, the Government received independent advice that ISP filtering to remove blacklisted sites would take just 10 milliseconds and that this delay is generally not noticeable to the user," Senator Conroy said. "The Government should stop making excuses and do all in its power to prevent children from being exposed to prohibited internet content.".... Labor leader Kim Beazley last week put internet pornography back on the agenda saying Labor, if elected, would force ISP's to offer a "clean feed" internet service to Australian families....
The Government was pursuing technology to control the net, Senator Coonan said. ... The latest study found that ISP filters continued to create network performance problems, Senator Coonan said. The best-performing filters slowed network performance by 18 per cent, while the worst-performing filters degraded the network by 78 per cent. "They found that even the best-performing filter missed about a quarter of the content on a small prepared list of sites." ... "We are continuing to look into it," she said. PC-based filtering offered parents greater flexibility than the one-size-fits-all approach of ISP filtering, she said....
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