[AusNOG] Happy new year / New rules for age-restricted internet and mobile content after the 20th of january 2008

[Matthew Moyle-Croft]

>
> Would be great to hear some other point of views...
>
> Cheers
>
> Marco
>   
I think one of the things that upsets me is the assertion that people 
against this mandatory filtering are somehow FOR child pornography:

"Labor makes no apologies to those who argue that any regulation of the 
internet is like going down the Chinese road," Mr Conroy said yesterday. 
"If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, 
then the Rudd Labor Government is going to disagree."

(http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/labor-warned-on-porn-filters/2008/01/02/1198949855875.html)


Deep down though reading some of these media articles it seems apparent 
that this will be just a waste of time so the government can be seen to 
be "doing something for the kids" rather than "doing something for the 
kids" through investing more money in Education, Preventative medicine 
and Social programs to improve the lot of some of our poorest people.

(1) ACMA will spend time and taxpayers money surfing for porn to 
identify a "bad" list which will be incomplete and really just be about 
sites that people really won't be visiting anyway on the whole.
(2) We'll (ISPs) be required to filter this list for people but kids 
will still see porn because they won't be able to block google image 
search with that list.
(3) No one will be happy other than a few vendors who've done a 
"monorail" job on us (see a Simpons episode).

MMC