iprimus – Stilgherrian

Stilgherrian’s links for 17 February 2009 through 21 February 2009, massaged and relaxed:

BLOG CASUALTY: Bernardi sacked for revealing on his blog that Pyne is not a conviction politician | VEXNEWS: South Australian conservative Liberal Senator Cory Bernardi was sacked from the Coalition front bench after refusing to withdraw comments he made in a bog post. This’ll be interesting: leader Malcolm Turnbull will be at the Politics and Technology Forum in Canberra next Thursday, from which I’m liveblogging.
Filtering “dangerous”, says Obama strategist | MIS: Ben Self, who ran Obama’s online campaign for the US presidency, makes his position clear.
Content Filtering | Primus Telecom: iPrimus, the largest of the ISPs to have been accepted into the government’s Internet filtering trials so far, explains how and when they’ll be involving their customers.

Crikey logo

I’m in Crikey today, looking at Senator Conroy’s announcement from last week of the first six ISPs to be taking part in the Internet “filtering” trials: Primus Telecommunications (iPrimus), Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Highway 1 and Netforce.

One of the questions I ask is: Why is there further mission creep?

Labor’s pre-election policy said: “A Rudd Labor Government will require ISPs to offer a ‘clean feed’ internet service to all homes, schools and public internet points accessible by children, such as public libraries.” Apart from pointing out again that “offer” isn’t the same as “require everyone to use”, the policy doesn’t mention business premises. Yet three of the ISPs (Highway 1, OMNIconnect and Netforce) are business-only ISPs.

As network engineer Mark Newton says, “If the Government is scope-creeping its plan to include business, I think it has some explaining to do.”

The article isn’t behind the paywall so it’s free to read.

Tag: iprimus

Links for 17 February 2009 through 21 February 2009

Conroy announces filter-trial ISPs and clams shut