United States not happy about Australian Net filter

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 29 March 2010 14:56

Opinion and Analysis

The United States, the land of the free and the brave, and defender of the Internet, has 'raised concerns' over Australia's proposed Internet filter with Australian officials, according to a news report.

Political news site 'The Punch' has written of the Australian Government's desire to implement nationwide Internet filtering, along with The Punch's discussions with the US State Department over the Australian Federal Government's proposed Internet filter.

Although the Australian Government insists the filter is designed to restrict access material and information that is already banned in print format, it's hardly a surprise to discover that people are mistrustful of their governments, seeing as there are so many government scandals, so much economic waste, so many taxes and so much red tape - no matter which side of government is in power at the time.

Thus trust in any government is an issue, and when the world's most open communications invention, the Internet, is under threat of any kind of government censorship, people rightly wonder what will be next to fall under the censorship chopping block.

The Punch website asked US State Department spokesman Noel Clay about Australia's proposed filter, with Clay responding diplomatically that: 'The US and Australia are close partners on issues related to cyber matters generally, including national security and economic issues.

Continuing the diplomatic theme, while clearly sending a message, Clay continued with: 'We do not discuss the details of specific diplomatic exchanges, but can say that in the context of that ongoing relationship, we have raised our concerns on this matter with Australian officials.'

The ongoing concerns come at a time when one of the world's biggest companies, Google, which also happens to be a US company, has pulled out of the world's most populous nation, China, specifically over censorship concerns.

This was quickly followed by US domain name registration company GoDaddy.com who decided to stop selling Chinese .cn domain names, despite only ever having sold a few thousand of them.

Continued on page two, please read on.