Editorial - A War on the Web

In my last editorial for 2009, it’s unfortunately not going to be a good one.

As recently as today, federal communications minister Stephen Conroy has released the results of his mandatory ISP filtering trial on his website, which were somewhat rigged by excluding high traffic sites as well as allowing people to go into the trial if they wished, it seems only a small few decided to do so as the results show near total success.

But I wouldn’t believe those results as any mandatory filtering of the internet in Australia, which would come with enormous problems as every connection would be placed under this filter and would strangle speeds enormously and in some places where broadband is only available as a mobile option, it would kill the internet almost completely.

But unfortunately, this is only one part of a growing problem, as all over the world there is a War on the Web being raged by Governments and Corporations who cannot see that the world has changed and want to take things back to the way they were before the Internet came into existence (for more info on this, see my editorial on the ACTA negotiations).

The reason for that being that governments could control the flow of information to bring the masses under their power and corporations would get record profits as consumers would be enforced to play by their distribution rules, which would mean Australians, would miss out as the release windows here are among the worst in the world and to buy a DVD or Blu-Ray would cost you upwards of $50.

But some hope remains, the filter has to go before the parliament so I will wait to see what happens there before giving up, but this war has only just begun.