So technically, all those lonely horny men and women firing up the old browser after work are also breaking the law, but can you imagine the cries if they actually, you know…applied the law…to YouPorn or whatever?

At the moment, by viewing a webpage hosted overseas we’re basically bypassing the Office of Censorship (Literature Classification, whatever) and ‘importing’ our own media (although I’m pretty sure it’s not an offence to possess said unclassified literature), and they want to bring the internet in line with the process for more tangible forms of media (for whatever stupid reason). It’s a foolish effort, but I have this unfortunate feeling that they will get some measure of what they want, despite all the outcry.

It seems to be the in-fashion thing among Western governments to push unpopular legislation through, despite the wishes of their constituents.

I’m a huge believer in freedom of speech, expression, and freedom of information. I also believe one of the main functions of the internet was to facilitate this.

I don’t think it’s fair to have to restrict the freedoms of ordinary Australians (and people around the world) because the government has no confidence in catching sex traffickers and producers of illegal pornography and other content.

If they do not have the necessary amount of evidence to prosecute these people, then they also do not have enough burden of proof to censor them, let alone the entire system – which has already been proven to be inaffective.

From a financial perspective, with the impending death of the newspaper and declining success in television and radio advertising, internet marketing is the way of the future.

I work in internet marketing and I gotta tell you – porn and adult dating make up a considerable portion of funds for advertising. There are already restrictions on how and where they can advertised, and everything must be approved through net editors before anything goes online. Anything illegal is filtered out through “blocked items list” and inappropriate adult terms are blocked and added to “inappropriate adult” lists.
It’s not as though people aren’t trying to make the internet a safer place.

If the firewall ends up happening, businesses will lose this advertising forum and websites like adultdating.com and RSVP will no longer be able to function. Their companies are likely to fold, resulting in massive job losses etc.

The thing is, removing the site isn’t going to remove temptations. People will go elsewhere for adult products and services so this firewall isn’t going to solve anything.

My opposition is from first principles – it’s a clear violation of the constitutional separation of powers in government. How it’s supposed to work is that the legislative branch (K.Rudd and his cronies) write the laws, the executive branch enforces them (via the police), and the judicial branch determines whether disputed cases are in breach of the law, and mete out any punishments required.
This proposed filter completely bypasses any right to a fair trial and burden of proof, by concentrating all the power in the legislative branch and ignoring the others.

Given that I trust these peoples’ word about as much as I did WMDs in Iraq, that’s completely fucked. I think that freedom of speech is an issue too (and it’s important), but it’s only a problem because the government isn’t following the due process. It’s just not their place to decide whether something is unlawful, and ‘unwanted’ is not even something that can be banned (thanks Mr Conroy).

Anyway, if child porn is really a problem (and I strongly suspect that it’s just a catch-cry to mask an agenda), the money should go to the relevant police unit so that they can identify and prosecute those responsible. That’s the way the system is set up, precisely so that the infractions of the few don’t impinge upon the rights of the many. They know that, this is POLS1010 material.

I mean, I’m an IT guy and I know that it can never work anyway. You’d need to do something like China has, which costs billions every year, and it still doesn’t work especially well.

Out of interest, what’s your reason for opposition? Draconian things like this always bring very disparate groups of people together.