Few Contribute To Aussie Classification Review

dopeywan.kenobi writes "The Australian Law Reform Commission are conducting a review of the Australian Classification laws, the outcome of which will influence Australian internet filtering and/or the long awaited R18+ Video Game classification. Public submissions on the matter have been accepted since 20th May 2011 and will close on the 15th July 2011. From the article : '[A]s yet only 80 public submissions have been made — 80 per cent of them from people who believe in government intervention for the sake of child protection. Considering, the furious debates within Australia's technology communities, does this reflect the national balance?...'It's likely down to the media for failing to inform the public on the matter.' Having read the questionnaire, I can't help but wonder if their convoluted phrasing is contributing to reports that people are only partially completing the form without submitting." I wonder how much of it, too, is that people don't want to be tarred as favoring child pornography just because they're uncomfortable with by-domain censorship.

Re:Call me "Anti Free Speech" if you like

[MimeticLie]

I think the position taken by most of the "horde" is that governments have consistently shown that they will either list sites incorrectly or just outright abuse filtering systems like this. To quote an earlier story: [slashdot.org]

Additionally, despite the claim that the main aim of the filter is to block child pornography, only 313 of the 977 total sites blocked is on the basis of child porn. At $40M AU so far in taxpayers funds, the cost so far is around $40,900 per blocked URL. Government efficiency at work...

40 thousand dollars per URL. I think that's really all that needs to be said. Even if every one of those URLs was related to child pornography, I'm sure that spending the $40 million on actually catching people who abuse children would be an infinitely better allocation of resources.