Aussie Prime Minister Wants Pokerless Internet

Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, is shooting for a different sort of online gambling ban.  He isn’t looking to make it illegal, but rather, he wants to disallow it on “his” high-speed network.

By “his,” we mean the Australian government’s.  Rudd is currently working to follow through on a campaign promise to build a nationwide high-speed internet backbone, so that everyone in the entire country can be connected, no matter how remote their locations are.  This network would be a “clean feed,” in that neither online gambling nor pornography would be permitted on it.  A tremendous “black list” of disallowed URL’s would be developed, and ISP’s would be required to screen every single URL to which someone navigates, as they are navigating to it.  Customers could opt out, though, by contacting their ISP’s.

Critics of the plan say that having the entire population on one high-speed network (not to mention the data flowing to and from the ISP with each URL check) would defeat the purpose of high-speed.  It would just get bogged down with traffic.  John Howard’s administration conducted a study of a “clean feed” network in 2005 and concluded that it would slow things down by 18 to 78 percent.