After the rather spectacular failure to get everyone in the country to install filtering software on their PCs with Internet Explorer (durhur), the Australian Federal Government is attempting to force ISPs to implement filters instead. One "child-safe" filter will be opt-out, but the second "illegal material" filter will be compulsory and carried out at the ISP level. That's right, you can't opt out of the second filter no matter how old you are.

The trouble is that this policy is being written by people who don't understand a whole lot about the Internet. Bandwidth is a precious resource in Australia and we're looking at a big drop in access speeds if the filters are implemented. The filtering methods tested by the Government thus far haven't been particularly accurate, and only HTTP traffic is filtered; you can still get anything you want via torrents.

The definition of "illegal" seems to be sliding around an awful lot, too. This proposed policy is being driven by Family First, so you can probably imagine what else will be deemed "illegal" over time. Fetish and pro-anorexia websites have already been mentioned as fitting the "illegal" criteria. I'm fairly sure this would see the disappearance of every Australian on y!Gallery. (Until we all move to using a proxy server, of course.)

Critics of the filters are being slammed as paedophiles, as you would expect these days.

This was first proposed in 2006, but now it's really, dangerously close to being passed into law. I know I sure as hell wasn't voting for this in the last election; were you?

If you want to do something about this, you can visit the No Clean Feed website to find out more about the proposed policy, then write to your local member of parliament, your ISP and most of all, tell other people about it!