Posted 17 March 2009 - 08:00 PM
The good thing is that it will make the government look ridiculous in the eyes of people, especially young people. Censoring the internet is not as easy as it may seem to some clueless bureaucrat. You could, for example, host your website outside Australia to avoid the fines, or use anonymous proxies to access censored websites. We have one of these blacklists in Finland as well; it was meant to censor websites suspected of displaying child pornography, but it actually mostly bans access to normal porn sites (note that this pattern is very usual for governments: make something that everybody agrees is bad illegal, then slowly expand that law to include other things). Yet, this blacklist can be pretty easily avoided by using a proxy, which is apparently something the government officials failed to realize.
The internet is the best thing that's ever happened to freedom.