Australian ISP Agrees To Filter... Just To Show How Stupid It Is

from the that'll-show-'em dept

Wed, Nov 19th 2008 9:49am — Mike Masnick

Australian politicians have been pushing to censor the internet for years, with its latest initiative being the most extreme and most ridiculous. Of course, even though each and every past effort by the Australian government has failed miserably, they always seem to think that this time it will be different. At least the largest Australian ISP thinks the government is out of its mind. The CEO of iiNet has agreed to sign up for the filters, but only to collect hard data in order to prove to the government "how stupid" the plan is:

"They're not listening to the experts, they're not listening to the industry, they're not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help. Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we'll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we'll be publicising it."

Good for them, though it seems unlikely to work. In the past when similarly ineffectual filters were demonstrated, Australian officials just interpreted it to mean they needed to pass stricter laws.

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Filed Under: australia, filters, isps, porn, regulations
Companies: iinet

11 Comments

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fprintf, 19 Nov 2008 @ 11:02am

Old news...
It seems the pace of the Internet is too quick to blog about it. On November 11th, Slashdot covered this topic pretty comprehensively: Slashdot article
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Mike (profile), 19 Nov 2008 @ 11:18am

Re: Old news...
No offense, but it's not a race. We hadn't covered the story. I thought it was interesting, and many of the folks here do not read Slashdot.

I don't decide to not run stories because they've been covered elsewhere, and there are plenty of times when we cover stories before others. For example, a bunch of sites have been writing about Charles Nesson's lawsuit against the RIAA this week (and people keep submitting it to us). But we wrote about it weeks ago already. But that's fine, because getting more people to know about it is a good thing.
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Greg, 19 Nov 2008 @ 11:28am

Sounds familiar
Similar tactics in religion and the wars on terror and drugs. Every time a tactic fails and makes things worse, proponents cry about the world going to hell in a handbasket and push for stricter measures, which make things worse still. Repeat ad nauseum...
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Reason, 19 Nov 2008 @ 11:54am

Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance seems to be rampant in politics. And from the looks of things, it's really, really bad in Australia. I feel sorry for our Aussie friends.
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known coward, 19 Nov 2008 @ 12:13pm

But its for . . .
. . . . THe ChIlDrEn
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 19 Nov 2008 @ 6:09pm

Not Just The Government?
I thought all this nonsense originated from the previous Liberal government led by John Howard. Isn't new PM Kevin Rudd supposed to be a more reasonable chap? So why is his Labor party persisting with this truckload of fail?
Is this stupidity a little bit more entrenched than just party politics? Does it go a bit deeper in the Australian psyche than that?
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Fowl, 19 Nov 2008 @ 7:38pm

A little nitpicky perhaps, but iiNet is a distant 3rd, in the "size" race behind Singtel owned Optus, and previously government owned Telstra.
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Tamara, 20 Nov 2008 @ 1:59am

iiNet whilst a big ISP it's the 4th biggest(in terms of subscribers) ISP behind Telstra, Optus, and Internode.
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Mike D, 10 Dec 2008 @ 11:44pm

Re: Not Just The Government?
uhhh excuse me mr Lawrence D'Oliveiro apparently you haven't heard that the internet is not a big dump.truck it is a series of tubes.. so it would be a tubeload of fail.. duh
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Rev. Dak, 11 Dec 2008 @ 1:14pm

Re: Re: Old news...
Totally. I don't read slashdot, and this was NEWs to me.
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Alan, 26 Feb 2009 @ 2:53pm

Re: Not Just The Government?
No, it originated with Kim Beasley (in opposition at the time). The Howard government countered with free pc-based filters.
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