[LINK] Senate Standing Committee: NetAlert/Mandatory filtering updates

[rene]

On Tue, 19 Feb 2008 17:47:50 +1100, Daniel Rose wrote:
[...]
> Since, AFAIK, no ISPs have offered such a service, it seems that there
> is no viable market for such a thing.  Why then isn't there a coalition
> of church and community groups getting together to start their own
> clean feed ISP?  

There are already at least two Australian ISPs that were established to 
provide server-level filtered service (not a whitelist service), both have 
existed for at least several years.

Webshield ISP, based in South Australia, offers nationwide server-level 
content filtering, with both broadband (ADSL) access and dial-up (via 0198) 
access. From its website, it appears to have a remarkably good range of 
household-level configuration options, including such things as having 
filtering non-operative during particular hours.
http://www.webshield.net.au/

ItXtreme Family Internet, offers nationwide dialup access (via 0198) with 
server-level content filtering.
http://www.itxtreme.com.au/

Labor's mandatory filtering plan would likely put those two innovative ISPs 
out of business.

They use commercial content filtering products, but that is what their 
system was designed to do from the outset, they didn't try to add filtering 
points into their infrastructure at some later time.

Irene