Here the Pirate Party tells of their grievances with the UK department of Culture and how it met with copyright holders to discuss about having search providers police and censor active searches for things they deem violating copyright. They feel it will bring various unneeded costs to the companies and thus the users themselves.
Australia, have announced its plan to ban at least 500 and more websites from next month. the criteria of filtering 500 websites is that they contain or might contain Refused Classification (RC), such as Child Abuse, Sexual Violence, Content related to crime, euthanasia, violence, drug use and promoting terrorist activities would be banned.
The father of the Australian Firewall, Mr. Conroy corroborates with ISP's in Australia to filter the internet. However, with such censorship brings about issues of democracy and human rights. The violation of the basic human rights to access information on internet. Such censorship is said to bring in several controversies, illogical content bans and censorship of websites that are unrelated to content banned by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
A look at internet censorship around the world and particuarly the plans for filtering in Australia, considering Conroy's statements and the supposed support of the ISPs.
Talks of Australia joining other nations that have internet censorship. Focus on removing obscene sites and Child pornography. Optus and Telstra willingly censoring sites. Possibly a futile effort and filtering needs to be more thorough.
Comparing Australia with other major countries in both western and eastern to highlight the similarities and differences in censorship on internet. iNet is agreeing on helping Conroy to provide ISP blockage for the censorship (google blog search)
The voluntary filtering being introduced by some of Australia’s major internet service providers (ISPs) is on shaky legal ground
content filters based on Interpol’s blacklist of child exploitation material rather than the relevant portions of the blacklist that continues to be compiled by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).
But is that the way we make laws? We just leave the commercial sector to do its own thing?
Now, Australia is planning to bring the strictness with which they view films and television to the Internet.
Content that will be banned from cyberspace ranges from child pornography to discussions on euthanasia.
There is also new legislation that is being pushed by the Labor government to compel ISPs to keep track of the activities of their subscribers. It has been alleged that the government is trying to get a hold of the web browsing history of its citizens.
Internet censorship can really limit your activities on the internet. Mostly, countries ban some websites from being used with regional IP addresses while sometimes the websites don't give access to IP addresses of certain regions. However, the problems of internet censorship can be solved with the help of VPNs.
The Australian government has stepped up its efforts to censor internet content, announcing on December 15 that it plans to introduce laws for mandatory filtering before next year's federal election. The measures would be activated in 2011 and force all Australian internet service providers (ISPs) to block sites from a secret black-list maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA).