There aren't many people upset at the loss of the internet filter. In fact, of the three small pressure groups (outside of the government) that ever supported it, only the Australian Christian Lobby is crying foul.

It was never going to work. It was only going to introduce unprecedented censorship. This was detailed in numerous articles from the tech media, the tech community as a whole and many Civil Liberties groups. At one point, practically every tech title in Australia (at News, Fairfax, ABC, Allure, Haymarket etc) united to show how unpopular it was by publishing a poll which eventually showed 98% of a whopping 38,000 respondents were against it. That was just one of many other huge polls back in 2008 and 2009 which said similar.

Back then, much was made of how facile it was to circumvent, how Australia's haphazard Classification Board would be utterly unable to classify web content and that their Classification Guidelines were impossibly broad and didn't reflect modern values. Indeed, they still state that the content of Australia's most popular book ever is "obscene and offensive to a reasonable adult". Whatever happened inbetween all of these articles and Senator Conroy's subsequent decision to review the whole Australian classification system, the review ended up agreeing that a filter was no way to go.

As such, we're left with the significantly less-contentious (and equally ineffective), global, Interpol "Worst Of" blacklist which far more accurately reflects the content of the 'worst of the worst' child abuse sites (although there are still issues with it).

While having any kind of filter at all may make some libertarians uneasy it's worth pointing out that pretty much everyone agrees with some censorship in some form. Last time round, after asking the Christian Right, Family Groups, people who didn't care very much, techies, civil rights groups, adult publishers and Australia's top porn stars; the one single thing they unanimously agreed on was that overt child pornography needs to be banned.

Unfortunately, in Australia, we have to stress 'overt' because you can still be prosecuted for child pornography offences here without actually ever seeing a child... or porn! You can even be a child. This has been discussed (along with what is currently banned in Australia) here. An unfortunate recent spate of child porn arrests testifies to this: when a person is convicted of child porn c, the police now usually stress that they were guilty of possessing and accessing many thousands of images - as opposed to possessing a topless picture of a 27-year-old with small boobs, or a Rule 34 picture of cartoon characters.

Winners...

So now it's gone and the press and tech communities are celebrating for influencing Senator Conroy. Conroy himself can proudly claim to have followed due process and the recommendations of the Australian Law Reform Commission and the LNP, as Malcolm Turnbull has already demonstrated, has been able to give Labor at least some form of kicking for backflipping on a policy promise.

... and losers...

But perhaps spare a thought for the Australian Christian Lobby, who still believe that a filter could work to protect children and the public from internet nasties, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They aren't wrong that the Government has backflipped on an election promise. But how much attention should they be getting - not for pointing this fact out but for continuing to call for the filter to be implemented?

With the filter 'threat' gone - and I choose to believe it was undermined by asking probing questions of the right people, doing research and pushing technical information into the public domain - that's one of two major technology-based policies that have been 'dealt with'. The other is the National Broadband Network and policies in that area should be vulnerable to a similar approach.