Australia: If You Don't Want Gov't Censorship Of The Web, Speak Up (Free Speech) | Hacker News Reader

Australia: If You Don't Want Gov't Censorship Of The Web, Speak Up (Free Speech)

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29 pointsjsherry3 comments

Being from The Netherlands originally and living in Australia for the past 6 years I have come to notice that Australians aren't born demonstrators. They're complainers though, but they won't go out in the streets to enforce their complains. Only "hippies" would do such a thing. Very different from Europe.

Next to that there is an Australian government which is, besides the fact that they're not really a government but more a sort of unfolding prime time television soap opera, extremely patronising towards it's citizens.

Another problem is of course and which plays a key roll in the development of Australia is that they're so isolated. In Europe there's this cluster of close nit countries watching each other. No one is really watching Australia and Australia looks towards the US for cultural and social guidance. Not the best example in my opinion...

The national broadband network is a policy to introduce a single network to upgrade the country's internet.

I was thinking yesterday - this is a vehicle for censorship.

Once it is in, the government will be able to work with a compliant government-corporation to restrict access.

Pretty much. When you think about it, they had a considerable amount of backlash when they first floated the blacklist. ISP's may not have been that easy to manipulate to add the filter due to the loss of revenue as users would abandon ship as soon as they knew they were being filtered.

Enter the NBN, the carrot dangled infront of the donkey. Promise of faster net are just out of reach but still obtainable, the donkey moves forward wanting what it doesn't currently have not knowing that once it has it, the master has all control via deliverance of sweet crunchy carrots.

Where before they had to implement filters at an ISP level which would cause speed loss, why not build an entire network with subnodes that govern a smaller set of people. Deploy your blacklist between said nodes and you have an easy to control black list distribution service layer within your network without any sign of speed decrease.

Just a thought.

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