A Little Politics for the New Year

Stretch at Packetlife has a lively little write-up on the Australian government’s attempt to implement a nation-wide web filtering service.

From Packetlife.net:

Setting aside the myriad of technical barriers to implementing such a system, the most obvious question is, “who decides what gets blocked?” When a corporation implements a web filter, it does so in accordance with corporate policy — policy that is set by the owner of the network. But the Internet doesn’t belong to any one entity, be it governmental or commercial, so such an authority simply doesn’t exist at this scale. In a very Orwellian sense, this filtering initiative appears to want to create that authority out of thin air.

I don’t know enough about the specifics down under to weigh in very heavily, but I would never support any service that filters web content from my house.