In a cabinet meeting held yesterday, Australian Communications Minister Helen Coonan put forward a plan that will include subsidies for parents who purchase adult-filtering software, in addition to increasing funding for NetAlert.
A nonprofit organization established in 1999, NetAlert was created by the Australian government to provide independent advice and education on managing access to online content. In recent study findings, NetAlert found ISP filtering would slow network performance by 18 percent.
The government is also planning on launching a public awareness campaign and public libraries will be required to install the filter.
The Sydney Herald has reported that blocking access to adult material online is a prime objective of the Australian government in the lead up to next year’s elections.
Tasmanian Liberal Party Sen. Guy Barnett has been championing the filter since late 2005, when he and members of the federal coalition signed a letter to the prime minister calling for a ban on access to pornographic, violent, and other inappropriate material via the Internet.
The Labor Party favors filtering at the ISP level, where providers would supply a so-called “clean feed” stripped of adult and questionable content. Coonan has continually expressed her skepticism that this method would be effective.
“You can get a customized and safe experience that looks after emails, chat rooms, and peer-to-peer file downloading in a much more effective way than simply blocking half the Internet and slowing it down so that nobody can use it, even for innocent purposes,” Coonan commented when addressing Parliament yesterday. “Clean feed is anything but clean—it does not block all pornography or other offensive sites and does not make the Internet safe.”
The amount of funding the Australian government plans to subsidize is not known.
