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Countries such as Singapore and China have taken the rather draconian action of passing all traffic through filtering proxy servers so as to ensure that pornography and (in the case of China) politically unacceptable material can not be easily accessed by Net neophytes.

Here in New Zealand, we pretty much rely on the commonsense of Net users and local filtering in such locations as schools and libraries to protect people from this type of material -- and perhaps themselves.

But I was rather gobsmacked to read this story on the Australian IT website yesterday which hints at a rather "big brother" approach welling up across the ditch.

It seems that at least some Aussie politicians are in favour of a setup similar to the Singapore setup -- albeit with the option of opting-out.

At first glance this would seem to be something of an insult -- the government telling you that, by default, you're not going to be able to access some information that they consider you may not be able to cope with.

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On reflection however, I must wonder whether or not it's perhaps a reasonable way to protect children and the occasional, rather prudish, net user from a few nasty surprises.

However, one might wonder what authorities might do with a list of people who have opted-out and, by implication, may be hard-core porn-watchers. There's always the risk that names from these lists might be selected at random for "monitoring" or for the occasional early-morning raid - just to make sure they're not peddling kiddy-porn.

Then there's the potential for such filtering to be used for other purposes as well.

If you're going to filter porn, why not filter P2P traffic too -- after all, the common perception is that the vast majority of those files are just porn or pirated music.

So, would such a setup be a good thing for NZ? Should we accept a system that filters porn by default and requires "grown ups" to opt-out if they want to have unfettered access to all that the Net offers?

On balance I'd have to say no.

It doesn't take much searching to discover that those who really want to protect their kids can already take advantage of a range of products and services that provide filtering of objectionable material.

However, what government *can* do to protect our kids from Porn is to get stuck in and pass some ant-spam laws. Even better, perhaps they ought to muscle their way into plans for a multilateral agreement that the UK and USA are trying to forge so that these spam-laws become enforceable across political and geographical borders.

For many years I have been lobbying, through this column, for a multi-national anti-spam treaty, similar to the one that ensures the international enforcement of core copyright laws. It would now appear that such moves are now getting underway. Let's just hope that our MPs aren't too busy stuffing their faces at another junket to ensure we're represented.

A word to our ITC Minister: *everything* is "too hard" if you don't even try.

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