With a much smaller than expected take-up of the former Howard Government's free home PC filter software (probably because it also randomly blocked legitimate sites and slowed download speed), Federal Labor Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, is now ploughing ahead with his plan to impose a national filter at ISP level.
He has been repeatedly told by industry experts that a filter of this type will not stop inappropriate material coming via social networking sites, chat rooms and instant messaging.
That the technology doesn't exist yet which could successfully filter these sites.
Even the former Liberal Communications and IT Minister was forced to admit to these difficuties.
"At its best, mandatory filtering by internet service providers was an expensive and ineffective way to limit children's access to online pornography, Senator Coonan told The Australian.
At its worst, mandatory ISP filtering was ineffective and seriously degraded the internet's performance, she said."
While one plaintive cry on the Web says it all about ISP filters:
"This host was good to me for the first half, but during the last few months, i've been experiencing numerous problems.
Support, although responsive, could not fix my problems. Website constantly give me errors, they said it was due to my ISP's filters, etc... "
Support, although responsive, could not fix my problems. Website constantly give me errors, they said it was due to my ISP's filters, etc... "
But Senator Conroy, with one eye on his first kindergarten teacher, is intent on ignoring all the danger signs and has granted the tender for a trial which is expected to take place in Tasmania.
Poor Tassie. First in was the guinea pig in Hockey's smart card experiment - now it gets the chance to be annoyed by the Labor Right's absurd paternalism.
It will be interesting to see if Enex Test Lab lives up to its own hype about being a first rate testing facility when it undertakes the evaluations of available filter programs.
And what of the ISP filter programs which will be run by servers if Conroy's plan comes to fruition - will we find US filters such as this from the Christian right being commonly used?
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