Old rope for new policy

The Federal government's on again, off again experiment with web filtering has come back on again with the Prime Minister announcing the Federal government will provide web filtering software for families.

We should remember this scheme was announced over a year ago. Six months ago I asked the department what was happening with the scheme and didn't hear back.

One aspect of all of this is a lot of people don't seem to understand what filtering will do, a good example is from the AustralianIT story.

Jeremy Horn, 37, a web-developer from Pagewood, was among them. He welcomed the Prime Minister's Netalert strategy, saying internet safety was an issue for his 12-year-old son. "I want to know that he is safe online -- there are so many games sites he plays at the moment and a lot of them have chatrooms."

Unfortunately for Jeremy, it's unlikely any web filtering software is going to do much for chatrooms. Sadly I'm not surprised a web developer doesn't understand this.

The big flaws I see with both political party's schemes is they are obsessed with the web; much of the really damaging stuff on the net is happening in chatrooms and other forums. The other problem is the resources required to police the web are huge.

Both parties rely on the Office of Film and Literature Classification to review and ban inappropriate websites. This is a huge undertaking and will require a massive increase in resources. Even with that, they will have to move very quickly to block the bad stuff.

There's also the problem of what exactly is inappropriate. The Federal government already has form in abusing copyright law to take down embarrassing websites. It wouldn't surprise me to find all manner of sites banned for spurious reasons.

One of the disappointing things with all these policies is they miss the point of a lot of the problems. Sure, there are a lot of offensive websites that really aren't suitable for kids. But the real problems are much deeper.

The online predators are using legitimate web sites and other tools to stalk their victims. Blocking websites won't stop them.

But we shouldn't lose sight that online predators are a tiny group. The vast majority of cybercrime is online fraud, phishing, spyware and trojan distribution.

These aspects need to be adressed as well. Just blocking smutty websites does not make the Internet safer for anyone.