Chairman Krudd - Stop internet censorship in Australia

The internet was built to survive a nuclear war. If it can survive that, it can survive Chairman Krudd. It is designed to be robust and flexible at every level. This in part explains why it would be difficult if not impossible to build an effective internet filter.

Chairman Krudd's government has already admitted that it knows that there are ways to bypass most filters, and that it does not propose to criminalize doing so. Many schools already filter their internet connection. Kids already know how to get around that and many do. The kids are way ahead of Chairman Krudd.

Secure web access ("padlock") may also frustrate Chairman Krudd's attempts to filter the internet, because filters probably won't be able to examine these pages.

Putting aside all of the technical difficulties, consider the sheer volume of content. Estimates vary widely as to how many pages there are on the web but the number of web pages is probably somewhere between 10 billion and 70 billion, and growing at the rate of perhaps 7 million pages per day. Google claims that it has indexed one trillion unique URLs.

Does Chairman Krudd really think that anyone can ever trawl through all that to find "unwanted" material? At best Chairman Krudd could only filter out a tiny fraction of material in general categories that he deems "unwanted".

China is estimated to employ approximately 30,000 people to censor the internet. Is Chairman Krudd really going to follow suit and create a whole new bureaucracy for this purpose, the "Department of UnInformation"?

Another problem is the dynamic nature of the web. Old pages and sites disappear. New pages and sites appear. Pages move. Sites move. Like the sea, the web is everchanging. Even if Chairman Krudd had an accurate blacklist today, it would be inaccurate tomorrow.

Also, web pages can be set up so that what you see today is not what I see today.

The following article gives an interesting insight into internet censorship in China i.e. how it works in practice. "The Connection Has Been Reset"

The article details something that the Chinese government already knows and what many people in China already know, namely that there are many ways around the filter, but towards the end the article concludes:

What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother.

Chairman Krudd may well be relying upon the same thing i.e. that the Australian people are too lazy and too apathetic to circumvent his filter. If the filter is eventually implemented, the challenge for us is therefore to make it as easy as possible for people to circumvent the filter, preferably even automatic so that no action is required on the part of the user, let alone any knowledge.

Another way in which the filter won't work - in fact will have the exact opposite result - is known as "The Streisand Effect". When you block something, or attempt to, it gets more publicity and it automatically becomes more interesting, more sought after and more widely accessed than it otherwise would have.