With permission, I’d like to reproduce this forum post by industry insider Mark Newton about the Labor government’s plan for Internet censorship:

The Govt claims to be budgeting $44.5m for this scheme.

In Estimates on May 25th we see Ms. O'Loughlin telling Senator Birmingham about the ACMA blacklist:

Ms O’Loughlin—At 30 April ACMA’s blacklist contained 977 URLs.

Then, addressing Senator Ludlam:

Ms O’Loughlin—With the current breakdown at 30 April, 51 per cent were refused classification and around 32 per cent were child abuse material and child sexual abuse material.

According to my superhuman math skills, 51% of 977 is 499 URLs.

If we are to believe Conroy's expression of the Policy Of The Week for the week ending Friday 5th June 2009, those 499 URLs are the only ones that will be blocked.

... at a cost of $44.5m. That's nearly $90,000 per URL.

If 32 per cent of the list was "child abuse material and child sexual abuse material," and assuming that ACMA is actually qualified to make that kind of judgment, that means 313 URLs were in that category.

At $142,173 of Commonwealth expenditure per URL, I reckon I could employ a police officer for an entire year, tell him that his only mission for the year is to track down the pedophile who published that URL, and pay whatever travel expenses are required to track the pedophile down to his house anywhere in the world and arrest him personally.

But no, the Conroy/Rudd plan is to leave that material online where everyone in the world who happens to be interested in it can still find it, and spend all the money on Conroy's List instead — Which will inevitably be published, again. Senator Stephen Conroy will be spending Commonwealth funds on making it easier for people who are turned on by child abuse to find child abuse imagery.

I guess in these trying times, our Government figures that pedophiles need economic stimulus too. :-)

The only saving grace that such a scheme will have is that everyone knows that ACMA's content assessment process is so woefully compromised that it's highly unlikely that the list will be comprised of child abuse imagery, so leaking it will probably prove to be harmless. Refused Classification is a pretty broad brush, and almost all of it is legal, so who cares if it gets out?

Is that part of Conroy's political calculation here?

Mark’s posts on the Whirlpool Forum threads about Labor’s censorship plans are of consistently high quality, but this one was pure gold, and I had to put it out there for others to read.