Right up there with fighting gay marriages and Hindu prayer is Australian Prime Minister John Howard's push against "pornography and foul language" online says The Australian Age.
If this could be a campaign issue there, it can be here. (Though, Australian regulators at the highest levels seem to have a particular focus here -- see: "Excuse Me, My Pipeline for Perversion is Ringing" and "Big Brother Made Me Do It, Mate")
From The Age:
Prime Minister John Howard has made a strong pitch for the Christian and family vote with a $189 million package to provide a free internet filter for every Australian family.... Mr Howard used a live web-cast last night to between 80,000 and 100,000 Christians across the nation to announce the policy: "Net Alert protecting Australian families online".
That is something like $9 spent on this program for every Austalian. And, BTW, in an inauspicious start to the campaign, the NetAlert Web site is down until August 20.
The lion's share of the cash--$71.8 million--will go into a filtering program offered to individual homes and public libraries. Parents will be able to choose either to install filtering software on their home PCs or to request a "clean" connection from their service provider, which will be responsible for blocking pornographic content at the ISP level.
The government will post a list of approved filtering software providers on its Web site and mandate that all sanctioned vendors update their products as the threat landscape changes.
While individual filters will be available beginning later this month, ISP-level blocking may take some time to implement. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is currently planning a trial of ISP-level filtering in Tasmania that will inform the government's decision on a national launch.
The federal government has already examined the potential ISP-level filtering three times, starting in 1999.
Mike Masnick at TechDirt says:
None of it will stop predators from trying to lure children. There's this belief that if we just hide it away, these things will actually disappear. That's simply not true. Just as it makes sense to teach kids some sense of street smarts as they grow up, it makes sense to teach them internet smarts as well -- and then they'll be prepared to deal with whatever they come across, whether or not there are filters.
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