While Internet Censorship is nothing new, the revealing of the Australian Communication and Media Authority secret blacklist has given the debate renewed impetus. While the majority would agree that websites containing illegal material such as child porn should be censored the net now seems to have been cast much further afield. Close to 2400 web pages are on the new list including some from Wikipedia, You Tube and online poker sites.

Australia is currently trialling its censorship crawlers through various Internet Service Providers and while the system is managing to crack down on some criminal activity the question being asked by some is "where should the government draw the line?"

The Minister in charge of Australia's Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy is the Senator the Honerable Stephen Conroy.  He is overseeing Australia's role as "Test Case" for the world on mandatory internet filtering. As you can see from the Wikipedia sourced map, uploaded on 28th December 2008 below, many countries in the world have some internet filtering. However, in the western world the filtering is controlled by the individual via parental lockout systems. Australia is the first country looking at government controlled censoring.

Some questions that this elicits are:

* What Criteria will be used to decide upon what get's filtered?

* How effective will this system be at preventing younger users from finding banned content?

* Will filtering impact on internet connection speeds?

* Who will block this content and what qualifications will they have? (Currently this is carried out by the Australian Classification Board which is a government run department).

* If a site is blocked or added to the blacklist in error what recourse will websites have to be removed from the list?

* How secure is the blacklist especially in light of the recent leak?

According to the internets founding father Vinton G. Cerf who is now Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, government controlled internet censorship will not work.  

The Question for Australia is this:

How far reaching will this be if legislation is approved in the senate?