It seems that no one is happy with the proposed Internet Filter.
Google, which today officially stopped censoring search results in China, said it had held discussions with users and parents around Australia and “the strong view from parents was that the government’s proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access”.
Microsoft demanded protection against “arbitrary executive decision making” surrounding content added to the list and noted the potential for banned material to be loaded on to a site without the sanction of the owner of that site.
“Yahoo are entirely supportive of any effort to make the internet a safer place for children, however mandatory filtering of all RC material could block content with a strong social, political and/or educational value,” Yahoo’s submission read.
Telstra fears the blacklist of banned sites could be leaked – as has already occurred last year – and “could be used as a directory of harmful content, which would therefore become more easily available to users that are able to circumvent the ISP filter or who are located overseas”.
Even the Australian Christian Lobby, one of the biggest supporters of the internet filtering plan, said inadvertently adding innocuous content to the blacklist would “undermine the entire policy”.
Basically Conroy is on is own.