As late as last Friday the media were still questioning Senator Conroy and the Rudd Government's motives for seeking to impose mandatory censorship on Internet access from Australia and Perth Now was giving a somewhat tongue-in-cheek example of one of the most common forms of the unintended consequences of such censorship.
The Dept. of Broadband, Communication and the Digital Economy informs that the upcoming trial of national ISP-level filtering will have funding for those ISPs participating.
The Minister tells us that the Rudd Government is committed to spending many millions in establishing this national censorship.
It seems that taxpayers will probably pay thrice over - for conducting the live trial, for the Australia-wide implementation of the filtering system and as an additional service charge to cover ongoing costs in every monthly account they receive from their ISP after that.
What Conroy is careful not to point out is that for the cost of an email, the Rudd Government and ACMA can get search engines like Google to remove illegal and/or offensive content, as these snapshots from Chilling Effects clearly demonstrate.
In total literally thousands of take down notices have been received over the years by search engines, web sites and blogs in relation to illegal/inappropriate content, copyright infringement or defamation. I have yet to hear of a serious complaint about pornographic or offensive content not being acted on.
NB: the NSW Parliament is now in possession of its own November 2008 E-brief on Internet filtering which raising many of the concerns expressed elsewhere about the Rudd-Conroy Great Firewall of Australia.
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