This is really all about control.The ruling oligarchy already have control of the mainstream media but the World Wide Web is a real and threatening wild child to their agenda of controlling what information can be accessed by the citizens.And information is,ultimately,power.

The pornography issue is just a convenient excuse.Parents are the ones responsible for what their children access on the media.This is really an issue of civil rights and the maintenance of a democratic society.

The Australian Gov can save a lot of cost by not reinventing the wheel here, just buy the tech off China, it works pretty good for them.
It's a great way to filter out information that your population shouldn't see or read.

Filtering of information could be important in some cases. In fact, Government takes responsibility for filtering of any traffic that should include also filtering information. Laws would imply.
The problem here could be in monetary outlay. I doubt that people making business from disseminating information via internet will stack for long with introduction of new filters by Australian government. They just will develop new programs. Thus any filter need to be redeveloped. That is endless money outlay. Information could be filtered for some insignificant time given significant financial outlay.
Means and ends have to be somehow balanced.

Conroy even censors his own site...

'I find this one rather humorous, on Conroy's website, if you take a look at the right hand side there is the "cloud" for searched items, the more searched the phrase or word is, the larger the item is.

Looking at the source code of the site, there is the entire list of words that the script uses to determine the cloud words and how prevelant they are. Basically breaks it down to an array, counts and then sets the size based on how frequent it is etc...

In the script that generates the cloud, there is a line that says basically if the seach term is "ISP Filtering" to skip and go onto the next.

In the time I was on the site, there were about 16 instances of "ISP Filtering" in the cloud, and only about 5 instances of E-Health, though ISP Filtering did not show in the cloud....'

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/1391908.html

'The source code mentions

// Script Authour: Aleks Bochniak

because it is a version of the code from the tutorial on Aleks' page here...

Oh, now that is just GOLD. they can't even manage their own basic webdesign without some online tutorials. Good luck censoring our entire counties internet.'

The big question that I have is the following: "Who is going to decide what information will be taken out and why this particular information has to be taken out?". And what if they wrong?

Applause! Great article. You included quite a few novel arguments I haven't heard before. No rational person could support a filter based on RC.