Hobbling Australia's Internet

The recently elected Australian Government has done some wonderful things and some completely boneheaded things. Its current plan to filter the Internet definitely belongs in the latter category.

If you haven’t heard about this, here’s a brief rundown. The Australian Commonwealth Government is introducing legislation that will force all Australian servers to filter Internet traffic and block any sites deemed inappropriate. The government gets to decide which sites earn that “inappropriate” tag and the resulting blacklist will not be made public in its entirety.

Let’s put to one side the political reasons why this is a bad idea (that’s quite a pile we’ll have on the side) and simply focus on the impracticalities. Testing has already shown that:

• the filtering will slow traffic on the Internet (in some cases throttling it down to only a tenth of its usual pace);
• legitimate sites are sure to get blocked. It will be a nightmare for these sites to get themselves freed up once more;
• automatic filters will miss a whole lot of “inappropriate” content.

Almost everyone who has a practical understanding of the Internet has said this is a stupid, unworkable plan. But you know governments: sometimes that urge to be paternalistic trumps commonsense. This is one of those times.

GetUp is organising a campaign to stop the idiocy and save the Internet for all Australians. If you’re from my homeland, I urge you to add your signature to GetUp’s petition and support its campaign. You can do so using the box below. [Update: The campaign has closed, so I’ve removed the box as it was slowing the loading of this page.] You can also learn more about the scheme by reading GetUp’s Factsheet.