The first speaker was Danny Yee from Electronic Frontiers Australia, a group that promotes civil liberties on the internet.
"The government is still treating the internet like a broadcasting medium," Yee said, "so they are applying film classification guidelines to them, even the static internet."
Yee said that internet censorship could potentially extend to anything in Australia that has been refused classification, including all X-rated content.
(Image credit: Alex Serpo/ZDNet.com.au)
Why? Because unlike the "anonymous" poster above, they think!
"A storm in a tea cup"????
You need to get real and take another look.
Here we are in a country that, along with many others, was complaining about China censoring the net and we're about to let the government start doing the same thing!!! This is hypocrisy at its finest!!
Sure...I think we need to try and combat things like illegal porn, etc... but this kind of filter is not the way to do it!!! Particularly when the public don't even really know what sites are being blocked and for what reason.
So what if some people like to look at porn(the legal stuff)...they can buy it from the gas station so why shouldn't they be able to look at it on the net? Not to mention the effect this will have on internet speeds further down the line as the banned site list grows.
WE JUST DON'T NEED IT!!!!
If parents are concerned with what their kids are looking at, they either need to get better at communicating with the kids and discussing the good and bad stuff, or they need to adjust their outlook and take a little more in their stride. It's not all as bad as it may seem to them.
I have a son and that is exactly the stance i will be taking when the time comes.
A lot of censorship is already quite subjective and this just opens the door for the conservative dickheads to take even more control.
So wait, Is Kev going to have blokes with night sticks in front of the newsagent stand to stop kids looking at the Bikini Books?
In every service station, corner store and reatil outlet?
Australians have resources to secure there own machines and monitor their kids in what they look at.
He really needs to take off his nerd hat and get a grip.
It's not the nerd hat, it's his christian hat he needs to get rid of..
Nothing wrong with the description.
A perfectly valid use of the word which describes our Senator's knuckle head Luddite approach to his job.
Another moralist attempting to impose their own standards on others! It IS their education which is sadly lacking.
His knowledge of a very important portfolio is zilch!
Australia's billion dollar export market in Education, Telemedicine and Banking is at risk.
As the rest of the world gains affordable 50Mbps plans, we will again, suffer a technological 'cultural cringe'.
Australia voted for Evolution, not Devolution at the hands of Luddites. To put it more bluntly - I want Barry Jones, not Les Patterson.
I have two concerns about the proposed censorship of Internet content.
It's a bad precedent. Protecting kids from porn is the job of parents, not governments. How long will it be before we follow Vanuatu's banning of popular VOIP systems in order to protect the business of the telephone company? And, in the long run, censorship never works.
I don't think the impact on employment in the ISPs has been considered. When I look at the plans offered by providers, there are quite a few high bandwidth, relatively expensive options that will no longer be needed by anybody. Over a relatively short period, there may be a large drop in income for ISPs. This has the potential to put some highly skilled people, who currently wear white hats, out of work.
BEFORE the last election, Labor announced this policy . If you voted for Labor, you voted for this idiocy. 53% if Australians owe the rest of Australians an apology because it is entirely your fault that we have this problem. Next time, pay attention!
Sure people voted for censorship when they voted for Labor. They also voted to abolish work choices, embrace investment in schools, apologise to our indigenous populations.
People pay attention - unfortunately they can't vote for each policy individually, they have to vote for policy packages. It isn't 53% of Australian's fault that we have this policy. It is idiotic policy makers. Put blame where blame is due.
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Who took these pictures? Did the photographer have an agenda lol.
Seriously it really is a storm in a tea cup, isn't it?
Why waste CO2 on reporting this story.