Whether this plays in Washington is anybody's guess, but Down Under it's playing just fine: Cost prohibitiveness for what it thinks an ineffective solution has moved Australia's federal government to spurn mandatory Internet filtering to stop child porn.
A government study that looked into ways of stopping child porn, including a national mandatory Net filtering system modeled along the British line, was rejected after it was determined the system would cost $45 million a year at first and $33 million a year later on, according to Communications Minister Helen Coonan.
Coonan also said announcing the decision that mandatory filtering had too much potential to choke the Net and inflate its costs for consumers and smaller businesses alike.
"The biggest issue," she said in a statement, "is not so much the money but such an expensive scheme would not necessarily solve the problem and small to medium ISPs [Internet service providers] would be driven out of business for little or no benefit."
Coonan added that what does work is better and more information and parental supervision of their children's Internet time. "That," she said, "is the kind of program that the government is promoting."
