As Brad says, there are far more issues at hand here. ISP filtering would be a dreadful imposition on people trying to use the net for other purposes. My experiences with net filters have been attrocious. They always tend to fall on the ‘safe’ side of censorship, and so lots of useful information gets blocked due to ambiguity.

Yes, we need to have this debate, but this article contributes very little. All I have gathered from this is that we should stop children looking at porn. I totally agree, and so would virtually everyone else. Is ISP level filtering the only way to do it? No, of course not. Are cars banned because children could drive them? No we have licensing and proof of identity, why not use a system like that instead? Sure you may have differing views on what people are interested, but really, why do you even care? As far as I’m concerned, consenting adults can do what ever they like. But we need to take steps to ensure this happens, and filtering the whole net will definitely not achieve this.

a) Those who are against the filter do not believe in society
b) Those who are against the filter think it’s ok for children to go and see R-Rated films.

Brilliant argument there Clive. You’re really winning people over.

it _is_ a problem, the Government should do something about it, but filtering is not what it should do.

The point about false dichotomies still stands.

1. Film/book/magazine censorship is a VERY dfferent to Internet censorship. One is obvious, one can be very insidious.

2. Just because government powers aren’t currently being used for “political censorship” doesn’t mean that they won’t be at some time in the future - and the proposed system would make it very easy to do with little transparency or oversight (as above).

It’s a big bad electronic world out there, ain’t it.

And what’s with your pr0n obsession anyway? As I’ve explained a couple of times, the internet censorship regime in this country already bans an extensive range of non-sexual and non-violent material because various interest groups have successfully lobbied against them. That material will be subject to a mandatory filter as well - as interpreted by ACMA bureaucrats, with no accountability. That’s why filtering is EXACTLY a slippery slope because the list of material deemed objectionable by politicians and those who lobby them only ever expands, it never contracts, and will be administered with no transparency.

There are plenty of tools out there for parents who want to protect their children online. All it takes is a bit of time and responsibility. But instead we get these self-appointed parental representatives who would have us believe parents are somehow supine and powerless before the media and need the government to do their job for them. Any parent who can’t stop their child from accessing the sort of content you reckon is just a couple of clicks away isn’t trying.

Sadly putting the infrastructure in place to eavesdrop on your population with impunity may prove far too tempting for politicians and/or law enforcement officials - need we bring up the example of the illegal wiretapping in the USA?

You also say: “We know that teenagers and younger children are getting extensive exposure to p-rn on the internet and on their mobile phones.”

Isn’t it the responsibility of parents to police the types of material that their children look at? The technology changes, but the curiosity of kids, and the responsibility of parents does not. Despite the current regulation – it’s not that hard for a kid to find explicit material that’s NOT on the internet.

“a few extra clicks of a mouse will take you to a vast array of extreme and violent s-xual practices” – Really? You must be really busy on your PC when you’re not writing puritanical rants about internet users….

“93% of parents of teenagers who, in a 2003 Newspoll survey, supported automatic filtering of internet” – 93% of parents of teenagers who are TOO F**KING LAZY TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THEIR OWN KIDS!!!

Bah. Keep your head in the sand, see if we care.

Also, the attacks on opponents as being morally void are a lovely touch on a poorly thought through piece.

[1] IE will it block things it shouldn’t, and not block things it should

The secret list includes sites listed under terrorist legislation. That is political censorship. There is no appeal process for any site that is incorrectly blocked and manages to find out it is blocked. There is no consumer or civil liberties representative on the Cyber Safety Working Group. Who is deciding what is safe for us? Microsoft, Google and NewsCorp maybe? Very democratic group of corporations out there looking after their own interests. Where is the TV Safety Working Group? Children are exposed to many more hours of TV than the internet and at a much younger age than the internet. Is the government going to restrict access to Chinese dissident sites as part of the “trade” agreement? There is nothing to stop them doing just that.

Senator Conroy’s handling of this is insulting. Maybe he really doesn’t understand what he’s proposing. He has used misguided information. What is “inappropriate” or “unwanted”.

There are around 6 million internet connected homes. Only 1.5 or so million of them house children. What are their parents doing? Surely as an adult, I don’t need my access restricted to a government approved list of childsafe sites and risk being put on a list for opting out. Very slippery indeed.

Iran blacklisted another 5 million sites today. The proposed systems are also capable of being used for monitoring, logging and breach of privacy and are used for just that purpose by China and Iran if it suits them.

Clive is right in saying that there are two issues, namely whether we “should” filter porn and whether we “can”, but in either case his arguments don’t stack up.

The Internet shouldn’t be compared with other media as if they were all cut from the same cloth. For a start, it is international and its ethos is of neutrality. Control is anathema to its concept. Attempts to censor content require enormous effort and are mostly useless unless “white lists’ are implemented. In effect, that requires the censor to determine what are ‘good’ sites for us to view.

Much dubious content is exchanged via peer-to-peer networks and cannot be successfully monitored without a huge burden on ISPs. The government would be better off directing funds to those organisations fighting paedophilia and other net crimes.

To gain some idea of how difficult it would be to filter out undesirable content, consider how much net fraud occurs each day (Washington Post reported the other day that details of 500,000+ bank and credit card accounts were stolen by one trojan alone). Keeping your PC free from malware requires you to keep your anti-virus programs up-to-date and yet you’re still vulnerable to attack. ISPs have yet to devise a way to filter this stuff out, let alone identify and block pornographic images.

As to whether we should filter porn or any other material, I would need a lot of convincing that a government agency should be trusted to decide what I can and can’t watch. Why not leave things the way they are and encourage parents to use other means to protect their kids?

Some observations: I notice the ‘adult’ industry reckon 4 million access porn out of 20mil population. That’s a big. Mores are on the moves as per local 60 Minutes story recently.

On the other hand it must be a nightmare for parents to raise kids with realistic and respectful attitudes to sex, especially with brains lagging bodies. It must be the biggest consumer of silicon around. On another tack I wonder what it does for reduction in population growth rate, if any?

Clive’s piece seems overly long to say the same substance - looks like reaching a bit. That said I personally have no doubt Clive is taking on this issue in good faith. I think he is right about how unhealthy and exploitative the porn industry is turning people into meat.

On the other hand I think the rebuttal case has alot of weight too about right to choose and privacy. It’s an area that requires a skilled politician to resolve with merit on both sides.

How many people were busted around world recently in that global pedophile sting? People on the internet leave fingerprints. The cops just set up a honeypot of child porn for the sickos to flock to and then hunted them down with their IP and credit card numbers in the following months.