Australia’s “clean feed” to be gambling-free, slow Internet
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Australia’s recently elected prime minister, Kevin Rudd, who ran on a Labor Party platform promising to bring high-speed Internet to the country, is now pushing for a plan which experts say will actually slow down the Internet.
“Australia has fallen badly behind our competitors,” said Rudd during the campaign, of the need for fast, comprehensive, and reliable Internet access, “while this government has fiddled and fiddled, and fiddled some more.” As of November, Rudd is the leader of that government, and wants to do a bit of fiddling of his own.
The plan will supply a default “clean feed” to all households and schools, which would be theoretically free of online gaming sites as well as pornography. The government plans to create a massive black list of censored sites, against which every URL would be checked every time a user attempted to go anywhere. Although Internet users would be able to opt out of the clean feed by contacting their ISP, the overload created by all users of the clean feed would slow down the Internet for everyone.
The Australian News reports that a “2005 pilot study carried out by the former Howard government found a clean feed approach could cut down speed of accessing the internet by between 18 to 78 per cent.”
Critics also compare the clean feed proposal to China’s heavy Internet censorship.
