Telstra And Optus’ Voluntary Internet Filtering Coming Next Month

Just before the election last year, Stephen Conroy announced that mandatory internet filtering would be placed on the backburner as the country’s classifications laws were reviewed. At the same time, he announced that Telstra and Optus were planning on voluntarily censoring child porn websites. That filtering is set to start next month.

As Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson points out for The Daily Telegraph, the filter isn’t going to actually do anything to stop those searching for child porn from accessing it. But considering the list is managed by the ACMA and is not publicly available, the voluntary scheme does raise the same concerns about sites being wrongly classified and blocked without any means to correct it for the website owner.

It’s a murky, shadowy, grey area that would be better left untouched by censorship methods and better handled with international taskforces and good old fashioned police work.

[The Daily Telegraph]