Strewth! Will stickybeak Oz pollies come a gutzer over shonky web censorship plan?

The Federal Government there is proposing to impose on Australians a "national Internet filter" that all web users will have to use - no exceptions.

The original idea was mooted as a strategy to combat the incidence of child pornography but is now being extended to include websites deemed by the authorities to be "controversial." Mention has been made of preventing access to sites offering information on euthanasia or those "glorifying" in anorexia - whatever that means.

But where will censorship and denial of access stop? As Dr. Johnson is supposed to have observed "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" and although the prevention of access to child pornography sites is both desirable and laudable, extending such control to other areas of the Internet is dangerous in the extreme and a step too far down the road to potential totalitarianism.

Australia's Minister of Communications, Stephen Conroy (you can see Telecom TV's earlier interview with him elsewhere on this site) announced the censorship scheme at a meeting of the Senate's estimates committee.

When the plan was first mooted the idea was that the government would bring together companies, human rights organisations, academics and investors to discuss ways of dealing with the menace of child pornography whilst "protecting the freedom of expression and privacy rights of users" in terms of their ability to access other sites.

This proposal, termed the "Net Nanny" by the Australian media, originally included the proviso that web users would be able to maintain uncensored and uncontrolled access to any part of the web they fancy by registering with their ISP that they want to be excluded from the filtering process.

However, that option has now been rescinded.