State sponsored URL filtering

I am in the midst of a four city tour of Australia speaking on cyber warfare. There is much discussion of Australia’s plan to require ISPs to filter particularly offensive content. For the most part this is being touted as a child protection action on several levels, one by blocking access to child pornography and two, by limiting the things Australian children will be exposed to. This policy is in marked contrast with the approach of the US which is hands-off. The idea being that parents are responsible for limiting what their children are exposed to and it is no business of the state to be the arbiter of good and bad content. While I have been assured by one engineer who has seen the proposed list of blocked sites that these are truly horrible collections of offensive content, there is still the concern that the Government will get too involved in the day to day administration of what Australians can see. Once a national filtering service is in place will there be calls from special interest groups to filter other content? What about hate sites? What about sites that explain how to make bombs? What about sites that post potentially offensive cartoons of religious icons? Filtering, as practiced by China and soon Australia is a boon to network security vendors. But it is a shame that it comes at the expense of reduced freedom of information. Governments should back off these filtering schemes and wait for the markets to step in. There is a great opportunity for ISPs to offer Parental Control services for instance. The market will be able to keep up with changes in technology. Imagine a government that dictated spam filtering. That department would quickly absorb the government’s entire budget!