Australia taking a walk down the censorship path

It always starts with the best of intentions: protecting the weak and the innocent... and then once the censorship starts it becomes very difficult to resist the temptation to use it to get the rest of the world to see things as you do. So its like smoking the best, if possible, is not to start... because it may be really difficult to let go of censorship once the Austalian government gets used to it.

The australian labor party's move regarding censorship for protecting their country against the internet threats is well explained in this techcrunche's article.

Obviously censorship can be a real danger and can’t be the solution to the possible threat that internet can be to children. Selfishly I am therefore 100% against australia’s move, but the truth is I have a couple of young children and that I am sometimes worried regarding them using internet. Netnanny (or similar) is a good solution of course but I can’t help wondering about about my children’s friends whose parents don’t have an idea about how a computer works (let alone the Internet) but who buy a computer and an access to the web for opening the world to their children. There will definitely never be a Netnanny on these computers. So what can be done? Only a few weeks ago I heard about these two girls who committed suicide after diving deep into gothic sites. All this to say that it is really not simple and maybe some of you who have children know what I’m talking about…

There must be some solution which is other than censorship… At one time, for instance, it was proposed that pornograpgic sites all have the extension .xxx , but that went down the drain.