This is disgraceful.

Rudd WON the election because of the young vote.

Rudd's promise to deliver world class broadband here in Australia was HIGHLY appealing to young voters.

It would appear this promise - like so many others Mr Rudd made during his campaign, and since becoming Prime Minister - was nothing more than A SHORT JOCULAR COMMENT.

The Chinese government uses these kind of filters to block access to their citizens. The filters don't work very well so they also need armies of internet police. Is that where we are heading?

The tools to circumvent the filters already exist in commercial and open source form. Anyone can download them now free of charge. It just won't work.

This is a stupid idea. I can only think of it as a bargaining chip to get support of conservatives for the budget.

politicians love censorship. they thrive on controlling knowledge. a device to censor sex images will be used to censor political content.

it is in the interests of ordinary people people to keep the web free. if you let the pollies control your information, you will be their mugs, the tax-horses that support them blindly. that's what you are now, of course.

many of you are terrified by exposure to information at odds with the received wisdom of the elite. close your eyes and think of 'er majesty, having tea and discussing the form guide. there now, calm down.

there is pornography on the web. don't look at it. tell your kids about sex honestly and it won't hurt them, either.

for those who understand that pollies are people, andnot good ones, fight for freedom of information. it is an important tool in becoming citizens, rather than subjects.

Its a fool who says the internet is a wonderful invention until the porn is gone.

Millions of websites with sex acts and nudity corrupting this generations' children.

The net today, with its porn, is "the stuff of the fall of a civilisation"...pushing susceptibles into ever increasing sex crime.

There will be a massive computer somewhere correlating names, address and attidues for the coming global Antichrist...Revelation 13:16-18 and 14:9-11.

If the net originally came out of US Defence... they will also be sweeping to gather info on ideas that will help to kill people.

Will this filtering stop our kiddies from researching the blue footed booby? What sort of search results would we get if we were trying to research testicular or breast cancer? Would a young mum having problems be able to look up advice on breast feeding?

There are all sorts of perfectly innocent reasons for wanting access to information about genitalia. Maybe you want to find studies related to kids and porn because you're worried about it. You might want information on euthanasia not because you want to die, but because you're against euthanasia.

Another thing, will businesses, people using the net for educational purposes and similar be compensated for the reduced speed this filtering will cause? University students on campus are charged for internet access. Will the government compensate them for the extra charges they'll have because of slower downloads? Will people with timed call charges be compensated for the extra time it will take to download to their phones? Will government compensate businesses who miss out on contracts because they couldn't do whatever in time?

I'm paying for bandwidth. If the government wants to eat into my bandwidth I want compensation.

Arjay: "If Govt censorship can be narrowed to child porn"

On the contrary, it isn't narrowed to child porn, the explicit intention is to expand the net to include anything deemed "harmful and inappropriate". Conroy said on the ABC's media report yesterday this includes euthanasia. Note the possession and selling of information on euthanasia is currently legal.

Arjay: "who is going to watch the censors"

There is a black list now. It is a list of Australian sites that have had "take down" orders issued against them. For reasons I don't understand this list is secret, despite FOI requests. Thus the Australian voters don't know what sites have been censored in this way, or why. Current thinking is the new system will just expand this existing list.

http://www.efa.org.au/FOI/faq_foi_aba.html

Obviously a hidden switch that removes information from the internet is ripe for abuse. Combining that with the proposed lax definitions of what can be removed and it is nothing short of insane. Any of the recent spate of government leaks - gone. How about criticism of a government minister he claims is defamation, or criticism of the judicial process?

This has already happened. In March 2006, Richard Neville set a spoof site www.johnhowardpm.org that looked similar to the Liberal Party site, but contained an apology from John Howard for the Iraq war. At the behest of the Prime Ministers department the AFP made several calls to MelbourneIT, the people who controlled the domain name www.johnhowardpm.org, claiming it was a phishing site and demanding it be taken down - a demand MelbourneIT eventually complied with. Unlike conventional media MelbourneIT was just spineless, as www.johnhowardpm.org clearly wasn't a phishing site.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/breaking/government-shuts-howard-spoof-site/2006/03/17/1142098638843.html

Finally Arjay, you seem to accept that filtering "just child porn" is technically possible. It isn't in the sense that none of the filters stop child porn from being exchanged by email, or the myriad of other ways that don't use the web - or indeed a few ways that do use the web. You can, for example, buy an unfilterable, encrypted www channel from the US for $2/month now.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=783500