Gillard's bid to censor Internet not an 'effective move,' says Vint Cerf

Melbourne, Jan 22 (ANI): Google's chief web evangelist Vint Cerf has said that Oz Prime Minister Julia Gillard's bid to censor the Internet is not an "effective move."

The Australian government wants to force every ISP to filter websites rated with a refused classification tag, in accordance with a secret government blacklist.

The Australian Law Reform Commission is conducting a year-long review into the existing classification scheme in light of new developments in technology-especially in the online realm, and in media convergence.

"This (policy) is an understandable desire to be protective of society, but technically I don't think it's a very effective move," The Australian quoted Cerf as saying.

"The argument that there's bad information out there and therefore we should somehow supress it-one counter argument is the antidode to bad information is more information ... I think (web 2.0 pioneer) Esther Dyson was the first person I heard that from.

"This doesn't mean however that we could not, as a society, agree that certain kinds of information are societally unacceptable," he said.

Cerf said there was a big difference between the production and distribution of content that might be unacceptable to the general public.

"Some people would like to attack problems of content at the wrong layer in the Internet architecture," he added. (ANI)