Loonie Legislators and that Wacky Webernet Thingo

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But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist.

"It seems to me as if just about anything can potentially get on the list," Landfelt said.

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On the other hand, it's also how ISPs all over the world operate right now. Aussie ISPs like BigPond routinely offer bandwidth caps that appear absurdly low by world standards (how does AUS$29.95 a month for a 256Kbps connection and a 200MB cap grab you?)—but they also routinely offer "unlimited" access to preferred services like streaming video. Talk about picking winners and losers on the 'Net; this approach basically guarantees that Internet users will go with the ISP's preferred service, making it difficult for independent services to compete.

Or take Canada, where just about every major ISP in the country has admitted to regulators that it uses DPI gear to throttle traffic, often singling out P2P protocols. Bell Canada's system throttles P2P for nearly half the day, and it applies the same limits to those who buy and resell its wholesale service.

For the reasons that Free Press and many others have outlined, these seem like bad outcomes... but neither Canada nor Australia has suffered some kind of Internet apocalypse. On the other hand, they are definitely not hubs of Internet innovation.

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Betty Peters, 78, a retired nurse educator from Melbourne whose pro-euthanasia YouTube videos were included on the blacklist, said she was "outraged" at the Government's big brother attitude to Australian senior citizens.

"We do not need a 40-year-old senator like [Communications Minister] Stephen Conroy deciding for us what is good and bad. I am appalled that our free country has come to this," said Peters, who does volunteer work for euthanasia organisation Exit International.

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The list was obtained by Wikileaks from internet filtering software that parents can opt to install on their computers. ACMA provides its list of prohibited sites to these software developers for inclusion in their products.

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The sex offender law calls for, among other things, restrictions on how close such felons can come to schools.