That nasty Google is saying terrible things about his shiny net filter that he wants to give to all Australians,whether they want it or not.

Google, which has recently been involved in a censorship spat with China, has been one of the filtering policy’s harshest critics. It has identified a range of politically sensitive and innocuous material, such as sexual health discussions and discussions on euthanasia, which could be blocked by the filters.

Last week, it said it had held discussions with users and parents around Australia and “the strong view from parents was that the government’s proposal goes too far and would take away their freedom of choice around what information they and their children can access”.

Google also said implementing mandatory filtering across Australia’s millions of internet users could “negatively impact user access speeds”, while filtering material from high-volume sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter “appears not to be technologically possible as it would have such a serious impact on internet access”.

“We have a number of other concerns, including that filtering may give a false sense of security to parents, it could damage Australia’s international reputation and it can be easily circumvented,” Google wrote.

Conroy, unsurprisingly, instead of defending his policy against these criticisms simply attacks Google for uttering them.

630 comments, most of them calling him a dill, 96% opposition on the online poll (not scientific, as we know).

Categories: culture wars, ethics & philosophy, Politics, technology

Tags: australia, internet filtering, mandatory filtering, nocleanfeed, stephen conroy