Comments on: Australia’s Internet Censorship Plan: Where Are We At?

By: ChemicalRefugee

ChemicalRefugee — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 13:00:52 +0000

The economic reason not to do this, is that that a huge number of -very- big US web companies have a coalition that was put together after the scandals in the USA (with the net and China and human rights). The idea in the coalition is to use ANY power in these companies hands to stop people from censoring the web. -ANY POWER-

Just how popular would Conroy or Rudd be if they tried this junk (not just as a political ploy to show the radical right that it cannot be done, but to really do it) and then one morning … all of the sudden our entire nation got V-E-R-Y hard to find on the web – starting with our no longer being listed on google, yahoo, etc (and with NO AUSSIE being able to access their google mail account anymore or use the US based search engines). That WOULD be the obvious first result of the coalition push around their weight.

Worse, the telecommunications giants – MUST have specialised routers and switches made only by a a few select companies, and all the biggies which do that manufacturing are now part of the coalition. They could quite literally shut down all Aussie access to web backbones in under a year. goodbye economy.

By: David Steele

David Steele — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:30:05 +0000

To my understanding, the only ISP now participating in the trial will be iiNet, as Optus has bowed out. I have been writing to iiNet asking them to bow out as well; their response is that they are doing the trial to show how it won’t work – I say that this is not sufficient reason to experiment with technology that can be used to limit our freedoms in the future. After all, what doesn’t work today due to perceived speed issues may not be a problem tomorrow, but the encroachment on our freedom remains a possibility.

I think it is time for pressure on iiNet. There is no legal reason for it to participate, there should be an economic reason presented to it as a reason not to.

By: Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:44:19 +0000

Ben, thanks for linking to my piece about needing to know how to manage IT. It's a theme I return to quite often. If Conroy's department imagined they could notify ISPs mid-December and have some sort of technology in place before Christmas then they clearly have no idea how IT projects work. Even on a small-business scale it takes several weeks to re-arrange a network, and it's even more difficult with a "live" ISP network. It's interesting to note that they refer to it as a "pilot" rather than a "trial". A trial is a test, an experiment. A pilot is a draft version of the real thing. But none of this has been defined well enough to have a working system at the end of it. All the signs point to complete and utter incompetence.