The Net’s Most Wanteds

The Australian Government’s proposals for introducing web censorship, apparently for the greater good of the country’s citizens, has drawn flack from several quarters and the opposition has only got tougher with search engine majors, Google and Yahoo, joining it. The government had announced in Dec 2009 that it was considering monitoring internet content on the web.

This plan, dubbed the ‘the great firewall of Australia‘, is being pushed by the Australian Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, who has already tried it. Conroy came up with the idea of a censorship plan based on public complaints. He stated that an independent body would be set up to see which sites should be taken off the web domain depending on how much public censure they got. Any site rated ‘Refused Classification’ (RC) would be blocked by the internet service providers (ISPs) preventing all public access to it.

Critics see the idea as one violating citizens’ fundamental right of freedom of expression. They say a moral minority cannot coerce people into deciding what websites they should or should not access. There are also others who feel the filtering mechanism is taking the idea of censorship too far. The Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA) and the Inspire Foundation believe the subjects that RC would cover are too diverse for a prohibition to be implemented with success.

And now Google and Yahoo have slammed the plan and demanded that the government look into all aspects of such a scheme before it is brought into effect.

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