Stung by a research group's accusation that Australia's Internet porn laws are "useless" for keeping it away from young Net surfers, Australian Prime Minister John Howard has told lawmakers he is "looking at options" to deal with the question - including mandatory Net filtering by Internet service providers.
Howard's comment follows an Australia Institute report saying 84 percent of teenage boys had looked at Internet porn - including simulated rape - and a follow-up report accusing the Australian government of failure to regulate cyberporn.
Some of the options Howard might consider include requiring material to go by way of a "proxy service to blacklist and filter out any unacceptable Net sites," according to the Australian News. But he may first have to contend with a lack of unanimity among Australian lawmakers over the issue.
Independent Senator Brian Harradine said Australian Internet service providers merely have "a commercial interest" in letting more cyberporn be seen in Australia, but Senator Richard Alston said the government is serious about stopping children from viewing cyberporn, the News said.
"(ISPs) obviously have a view and a commercial interest and we ought to take that into account," Alston told the paper. "But at the end of the day we ought to make judgments based on what we think the community expects in terms of effective protection and certainly material that is criminal or morally unacceptable."
But the Australian Institute's follow-up report claims only 17 percent of Australian parents have filtering on their homes' computers, part of the proof that the current system doesn't work. The Institute called for mandatory filtering by ISPs, a system "likely to receive strong backing from the public, especially parents," the News said.
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