Comment Yeah, they just mandate it without legislation... (Score 1) 51
Govt: "Give me all your URLs"
ISPs: "No"
Govt: "OK, will you give me half?"
ISPs: "OK"
This is not a win. It is true that the government is no longer proposing new legislation. This is because they seem to be getting much of what they want without new legislation. In particular, it appears there will be a new industry "Code of Practice" which will then have force under current legislation (think of it as like changing a regulation). There is also going to be a 'police request' to the ISPs. It isn't clear to me at this point which of these, or how the combination, leads to enforceability, but it seems all Aus ISPs are now going to be filtered.
Good:
- The black-list will be the Interpol black-list, which I understand is at least reasonably well monitored and is quite small. It is also outside of political control in Australia.
- I'm guessing the filtering will be DNS based for domains on the list, forwarding them to a proxy that checks the URL. This means it will not affect people not accessing those domains.
Bad:
- We have a filter. This will have two effects: it will lead to worse enforcement of child abuse as people get complacent. It will cause the occasional problem like the Wikipedia/Scorpians cover (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_Wikipedia )
This is a shame. Child porn sites stay up longer than phishing sites because banks actually want the phishing sites down, not just covered up.
It will also be interesting to see what effect DNS-SEC has on this, but that is in the longer term.