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14 reasons why the filter is a bad idea |
Cost goes upChairman Krudd is planning to spend $44 million on this. Taxpayers are going to pay this! Chairman Krudd isn't even pretending that this amount of money will meet the full up-front cost. As an ISP customer you will also have to pay the rest. ISPs are going to have to:
These are the up-front costs. As always there are trade-offs. An ISP can buy more and bigger hardware, thereby incurring greater cost, but slowing the internet down less; or the ISP can skimp on the hardware to keep the cost down but slow the internet down more. The hardware and software will also have ongoing costs e.g. maintenance and licence charges, and ISPs are going to have to pay staff to administer the filter, including taking perhaps weekly updates from Chairman Krudd. These are not the only direct costsChairman Krudd knows that only filtering the web will miss a huge amount of content. He also has his sights on P2P, and he will later discover that there are many other ways in which people access information on the net. Expect the scope of the filter to grow and grow. This will mean more hardware, more software, more admin, ... more cost. Spending money isn't a bad thing in and of itself, but it is a bad thing when the mandatory filter is only wanted by a rabid minority and will not be particularly effective. What else could the money be spent on?
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