Australia's 2 Largest ISP's Start Censorsing the Web

unreadepitaph writes "Looks like after Stephen Conroy's web filter went down in flames he went quietly behind the backs of Australians and struck a deal with Telstra and Optus to start filtering an undisclosed blacklist of sites from organization within and external to Australia. From the article: 'Electronic Frontiers Association board member Colin Jacobs also expressed concern at the scheme, saying the Government and internet providers needed to be more upfront about websites being blocked and offer an appeals process for website owners who felt URLs had been blocked unfairly. "There is a question about where the links are coming from and I'd like to know the answer to that," Mr Jacobs said."

Hmmmmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does everyone want to save me? I am happy to be damned!

Re:Related to the NBN deal?

[Boltronics]

Telstra and Optus announced support for filtering back then [gizmodo.com.au] too.

Looking through the comments of that old link, I see the suspicions have long been present.

We have something like this in the UK

[splodus]

It's a 'voluntary' scheme whereby the biggest six ISPs implement a block list maintained by an organisiation called the 'Internet Watch Foundation'. They claim that only child pornography sites are blocked, but of course there's no way to know what is on the list.

Recently the first efforts to expand block lists to include 'other illegal' content have been made, and to set up a list for copyright-related restricted sites.

It seems governments have realised that legislative oversight is a bit of a nuisance, and it's just easier to coerce and/or bribe big business to get what you want.

He's that sort of person

[dbIII]

He takes a lot of things way too personally. One hysterical press release of his was about a "lesbian cabal" that was trying to stop the NBN. It turned out to be a female staffer that was insisting on sticking to tendering procedure to avoid legal problems and a female former member of his department that just happened to work for a potential contractor that agreed to wait until a contract had been drawn up before signing on. Two parties agreeing not a sign a blank cheque became a "lesbian cabal" in a bizzare press conference.
Thanks to the necessity of dealing with Telstra the Communications Ministry is almost a punishment post so it has been historically been given to a complete dropkick that a Government hates but has to give something to keep a powerful faction happy. Thus the long string of utter bastards and incompetant wankers in the job. Sadly Conroy is a competant wanker so actually manages to make progress on a filtering policy that his own party hates and only put up to get the reactionary weirdo vote. If he stuffed about on the policy for a decade saying it was a good idea and he'd do something soon (which is what the previous government did) everyone would be happy - even the weirdos that may get a few more paying customers in their fake churches.

Re:I wouldn't be too worried...

[xaxa]

Good thing I live in EU .... and its my right to have uncensored internet

It is? DNS is filtered for child porn websites in at least the UK (for some major ISPs) and Finland (IIRC).

(In the UK last time I checked, by doing a DNS query on a blocked hostname, my small ISP returned the IP but my parents' large ISP gave a 'no such domain' message.)

For Finland, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapsiporno.info [wikipedia.org]

(At work, "Access to lapsiporno.info has been blocked as 'Adult / Sexually explicit'". Shouldn't that be 'Child / Sexually explicit' ... though I'm not going to ask them to change it;-)