The Aussie government is offering a "free Internet porn filter" to every family in the country. While not mandatory — like the censorware in use in China and Syria — this still has grave implications. These filters are notoriously unreliable, biased, and capricious (Boing Boing's feud with one such provider, SmartFilter, began when they offered us a secret deal to change the structure of our site in exchange for unblocking us). Once a substantial fraction of the population of Australia is behind such a filter, a deliberate or accidental miscategorization could render a site unreachable by much of the country.
The plan is part of a new package, called Protecting Australian Families Online, that will cost almost $120 million.
Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan says the filters will let parents set access limits based on what they think is appropriate…
The Government will make the National Library use the filters, and hopes all other libraries will too.
(Thanks, Krisjohn!)
Update: David Cake of Electronic Frontiers Australia sez, "Actually, we here at the EFA have been counting this as a win, which probably reflects are fairly poor expectations of our current government. With the conservative government being heavily lobbied by conservative Christian groups and others calling for opt-out ISP level filtering, and a misguided opposition supporting them, a proposal that takes ISP level filtering off the table and replaces it with opt-in PC filtering has actually improved the political outlook here quite a bit.
"Realistically, it's likely that only a relatively small percentage of the population will take them up on the offer – we aren't a conservative nation, and surveys tend to agree that the main reasons people do not install filtering software is not price, but choice, so I don't think it will up percentage that use filtering software that much. The government attempts to force it on libraries is definitely a worry, though."
