iiNet Drops out of Australia Web Censorship Trial

by Jordan Yerman | March 24, 2009 at 11:30 am

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Major Australian Internet service provider iiNet has dropped out of the Great Australian Firewall test, citing censorship and transparency concerns. The Internet filtering trial is certainly not going as well as the Australian government had hoped: Wikileaks leaked the soon-to-be-not-so-secret blacklist... and subsequently found itself on the blacklist.

With this patchy level of support, Canberra's precious firewall is looking more and more like the Maginot Line.

iiNet only agreed to participate in the trial to demonstrate that the filter was flawed and a waste of taxpayers’ money, iiNet managing director Michael Malone said.

Mr Malone cited drawn-out negotiations with the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), constant changes in policy, and last week’s leak of a secret internet blacklist as reasons for pulling out.

"It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as ‘unwanted material’ without an explanation of what that includes," Mr Malone said.

So what went wrong? Evidently, a total inability to deal with a sudden weath of information control.

Your dime-a-dozen porno sites, Christian sites, Satanic sites, LGBT sites, and even a QLD dentist’s site has made the offender list. Why? Because some wanker in Aussie parliament decided it would be good to put that site there.