Chairman Krudd - Stop internet censorship in Australia

It is inevitable that some parents will believe Chairman Krudd's spin that his filter is about protecting kids. The parents will then become complacent about supervising their children's online activity. This will increase the risk to children.

The following quote, from the web site of a well-known ISP that provides voluntary filtering, illustrates the point.

David from South Australia: I am so happy using <name of ISP> because I don't have to worry about what the children are doing, passwords or anything. I was constantly keeping tabs on things before, but now I know <name of ISP> is doing it for me.

Filtering is not a substitute for parental supervision !!
Filtering is not a substitute for educating children about online dangers !!

Neither Chairman Krudd nor your ISP can or should do your job as a parent for you. Computers should generally be in "public" areas of the house, rather than in children's bedrooms. The greatest real online danger to children, grooming, will be completely unaffected by Chairman Krudd's filter.

Mandatory Filter useless anyway

The mandatory filter is in any case useless for protecting kids. Its scope is too limited. If you are a parent and actually want to prevent accidental or deliberate access by your child to adult material and want to use technology to achieve that then you will have to continue doing what you are already doing e.g. PC-based software.

The mandatory filter won't address many other dangers to children. (However we shouldn't get hysterical and exaggerate the level of danger that currently exists.)

The mandatory filter will not prevent deliberate access if your child is determined. In some respects an ISP-based filter will be weaker than a PC-based filter. That doesn't make the filter completely useless but it does highlight that a technological solution is often a bad way of tackling an "administrative" problem.

Making the Australian Federal Police's job harder

By blocking access to genuinely illegal material, it makes it less likely that the AFP can prosecute someone for accessing the material. If someone does still succeed in accessing illegal material (quite likely since the filter will be ineffective), it is less likely that the AFP will detect that, since the person will have been forced to use evasive techniques. The small amount of illegal material that is on the web could in any case simply move off the web onto other technologies, ones that are more resistant to policing. (Most such material has already done so.)

The $44m that is proposed to be wasted on implementing the filter could be given to the AFP, so that they have more resources to deal with online criminals. In fact, Chairman Krudd has reduced the funding for the AFP!

Kids now unprotected

The previous government had in place an optional filter, paid for by the government, that parents could use if they wanted to. Under Chairman Krudd's government this filter is no longer available, as of December 31, 2008.

Chairman Krudd's filter may not be available until 2011, so somehow Chairman Krudd thinks it's OK to leave kids unprotected for the whole of 2009 and 2010. If protecting kids is so important and is the real motivation for Chairman Krudd's filter, wouldn't he wait until his own filter is ready to go before canning the old one?

In reality though, everyone knows that protecting kids is not the real motivation. It's controlling adults.