Clean Feed? No Thanks.

As you may have heard, prior to the last election, the current Labor government mandated they would implement some form of ISP Level filtering of "Child Pornography" and other harmful and inappropriate online material" which has now been coined the "clean feed".

When I first learned of this particular mandate, I was a little concerned, because even while I was at high school, I understood the technical and social ramifications of implementing such a scheme, as the then Government had tried to mandate their own Internet censorship-- which was met with quite considerable outcry. The EFA ran a successful campaign against it. It appears however that the current Government (specifically the 'Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy', Stephen Conroy) are completely intent on ignoring all the concerns from both the general public at large and also notable experts from within the ISP industry itself.

When I was a member of the WAIA Executive Committee, we had a discussion with the a member of the IIA who mentioned that he'd spoken to Senator Conroy himself and we were told to not actively pursue our objections to the plan as in his words "the media had blown it out of proportion" and "if we keep quiet it'll go away on its own".

It appears to me however that the time for keeping quiet has long expired, as the Government seems to be trying to steamroll this mandate in, no matter what the cost (financial and social).

Alot of the weight the idea seems to carry seems to stem from the incorrect assumption that this "clean feed" will help protect our children from all the nasties on the internet, so hell, what's so bad about that? Whilst the basic premise is fine (and I'm not in any way advocating Child Porn), it sets a dangerous precedent for the Government to limit our social freedom and 'protect' us from anything they deem in-appropriate or unsuitable. Further to this, the Senator has gone so far as to say that anyone who doesn't agree with his proposal is for child pornography, which is absolutely ridiculous.

There was an excellent post to a Whirlpool thread by a 'mother and a long term writer of a leading Christian magazine' which really nails the problem on the head.

I'm not going to go into painful detail over the technical reasons why the clean feed proposal is flawed, as it's been covered quite well in most of the Industry news outlets, but many notable Industry experts have voiced their opinions (i.e. Mark Newton from Internode and Bevan Slattery from PIPE Networks) against the plan, saying it would be 'difficult', 'expensive' and 'detrimental to performance' if implemented.

So I'm calling on all of the Industry associations, news outlets and even my friends to try and spread the word to everyone they know, in an attempt to properly educate people of the disadvantages of the proposed scheme.

To be completely honest, I'm actually quite angered that the WAIA hasn't released any form of comment on the matter, nor have they made any attempt at getting out there and educating the general public about this issue. Isn't it what they're there for?