Australian Cyber-Safety Creating Online Gambling Censorship?

A re-election campaign in 2007 called for Cyber-safety regulations that would require ISP's to enforce censorship of all age-restricted materials over the Internet. On December 31st, the Australian Telecommunications Minister, Stephen Conroy, announced the upcoming enforcement of censorship by ISP's, now required to 'clean feed' related web sites, which may include online poker and online gambling sites, to all computers accessible by children.

Child accessible computers, according to the new legislation, include all home computers, school computers and public computers made available to children. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) will have the final word in what Internet materials are to be filtered. Pornography is expected to be at the top of the list.

China enacted a similar law, though with one distinct difference. Australians will have the option to 'opt-out' of the censorship. Therefore, a home with no children or child access to the computer may wish to opt-out, allowing them to by-pass filtering restrictions.

"Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road," said Conroy in a recent press conference. "If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree."

The law is scheduled to come into effect January 20, 2008. A Labor law spokesperson defended the initiative, stating that previous efforts simply were not effective. Those previous efforts included the free distribution of NetNanny to households who wanted it.

Some have criticised these efforts however. Sue Dunlevy, Australian IT expert, claims it will only slow down Australia's Internet, a direct contrast with the same re-election campaign that promised to speed up the Internet 'Down Under'. Another group believes the pan to be 'ineffective', stating "Anybody who's computer-savvy can work their way around these filters in about two minutes maximum."