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Aussie ISP pulls out of firewall trial

Can't reconcile with corp responsibility

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iiNet, Australia's third largest Internet Service Provider, is withdrawing from the government's censorship trial.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy is pushing ahead with a trial of filtering technology to clean up the internet as seen by Aussie citizens. Conroy claimed the list of banned websites were all related to child sexual abuse, but the publication of the list revealed this to be untrue. The list included euthanasia sites, Christian and satanic sites and even a Queensland dentist.

iiNet's boss Michael Malone said last year that the company was only taking part in the trial in order to show politicians what a dumb idea it was, and how it was a waste of public money and would not work. He described Conroy as the worst internet minister in the post's history.

Malone said:

We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship. 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. Everyone is repulsed by, and opposed to, child pornography but this trial and policy is not the solution or even about that.

Malone said the vast majority of child sexual abuse content was distributed using peer-to-peer networks - untouched by the Australian government planned blacklist.

iinet employs 1,400 people and has 750,000 subscribers. ®

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Latest Comments

@ Lindsay

iiNet wanted to participate to show how crap it was going to be. They told the govt that they wanted to run double blind trials and the govt said no. I guess it wasn't going to give Conroy the result he wanted.

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Re: Re: Good to see

Iinet stated from the beginning of this sorry story that they only wanted to participate to prove that it was a flawed idea from the outset. More power to them

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@Straight talkers

Yep, if a politician down here is being an authoritarian prick, (s)he's going to fucking get called on it.

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