[H-GEN] Internet Censorship

[Russell Stuart]

On Tue, 2008-11-11 at 12:59 +1000, Stephen Thorne wrote:
> At the request of the author, I am reposting
> http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1085503 here:

That link, and the link on Senator Ludlam's web site didn't
work for me.  You can find a transcript of the question and
Senator Conroy's answer here:

  http://viv.id.au/blog/?p=2509

Here is a brief summary.  Under Senate rules questions can be
no longer than 1 minute, and the answer must be no more than 4
minutes.  Senator Ludlum had given Senator Conroy notice of the
question, so he had time to prepare his answer.

Senator Ludlum asked Senator Conroy to explain a statement he made
to the Senate Estimates Committee.  In that statement Senator Conroy
said Sweden, UK, Canada and NZ had all mandatory Internet filtering.
Senator Ludlum said that on the contrary, none of those countries 
had mandatory Internet filtering, and asked Senator Conroy to 
explain the discrepancy.

Here is a summary of points Senator Conroy made in his reply:

- The government is aware of the technical concerns about the
  proposal, and this is why they will be conducting live tests.

- The ACMA has a blacklist of some 1300 URL's.  He said these 
  are mostly child pornography.  That list will be expanded 
  to 10,000 URL's for the test.

- The test will be conducted over the range of speeds most
  Australian households can currently access.  He implied the 
  government considered 12M bit/sec the upper limit of that 
  range.

- The government will also take into consideration the 
  experiences of ISP's in other western countries that have 
  implemented voluntarily filtering.

I didn't list a direct answer to Senator Ludlum's original 
question, as Senator Conroy didn't give one.

Under Senate rules Senator Ludlum can put a follow-up question.  
In summary, he asked:

- Will the Senator Ludlum be providing a retraction to the advice 
  he gave to the Senate Committee?

- What is the definition of the "unwanted content" that will be
  filtered?

Senator Ludlum asked other, largely rhetorical questions as well.
Senator Conroy answered that was too large a range of questions
to answer now (under Senate rules he has 1 minute), but he would 
be happy to answer them at a later time.