Senator Stephen Conroy is the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in the current Rudd Government, and represents Victoria in the Senate. During his tenure in the portfolio, he is responsible for the creation of the National Broadband Network and the proposed Internet filtering plan, and was named as “Internet villian of the year” at an awards night in the UK.
Image: Kim Davies/Flickr (Creative Commons)
EXCLUSIVE: Senator Stephen Conroy could be out of the cabinet with Prime Minister Julia Gillard already looking for someone to replace him as Communications Minister.
Photo: Kainet/Flickr (Creative Commons)
A $15-$20 billion compensation payment to Telstra over its copper network appears to have drove the Labor government in building the current NBN plan in order to avoid such a payment.
2010. What a year to end a decade. From political uncertainty in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, the leaking of important US documents – from Afghanistan to diplomatic cables – and even a possible upheaval of our classification system to finally allow a R18+ rating in Australia, bringing it in line with other western nations.
The National Broadband Network’s plan has been released to the public, giving many politicians an early Christmas present to find out more information about the $43 billion broadband network, and the NBN Co’s actual business plan.
Opponents to the internet filter have been given a temporary win as Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy announced that he will delay the implementation of the controversial filter.
The delay comes as a review into the classification scheme, mainly focusing on what is Refused Classification, is done and what is deemed Refused Classification on the internet – one of the main focuses on Conroy’s filtering plan.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is still not backing down, telling the Sun-Herald over the weekend that the policy was still going ahead. However, what he said might have caused some caveat with one of the ISPs involved. Can you guess?
Senator Stephen Conroy has gone onto the attack as news that the US State Department has said that it has an issue with its internet censorship plan, with the target placed on Google – who recently pulled its localised search engine after failing to get approval to stop censoring search engines – by highlighting its policies on content, privacy and censorship.
Websites for the Parliament of Australia and the homepage of the government are still feeling the effects of Operation Titstorm, as it continues throughout the day. Both sites, at the time of writing, are still down as a group linked with Anonymous – an internet group that is famous of starting a campaign against the Church of Scientology.
Google has today written a scathing blog post on the Australian Government’s plan on bringing mandatory ISP level filtering to millions of internet users in Australia, citing a report by three professors that found a wide scope of content that could be blocked under “Refused Classification”.
Below is the Government’s results of its filtering trial, released today. We have uploaded it to Scribd, so you don’t have to download it. Enjoy!
The Federal Government has today announced that it will give the green light to the compulsory internet filtering plan, after a controversial trial to filter the internet was conducted earlier in the year, with the legislation being introduced in Parliament next year.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has threatened the telecommunications industry with a plan to add additional reforms to the Telecommunications Act after an report by the industry’s ombudsman said that there was a massive spike in complaints from customers.
STORY HAS BEEN UPDATED.
The Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has given Telstra an ultimatum, structurally separate its retail and wholesale arms voluntarily within about 13 weeks or it will be forced to do so in one of the biggest shake ups to the telecommunication industry since 1997.
Communications Minister Senator Stephen Conroy has announced the board members that will lead the government-built $43 billion national broadband network, with the new members having skills in finance, technology, legal and business.
Optus, the second largest ISP in Australia, has been accepted to be part of the Australian Government’s filtering trial after being previously excluded on the announcement, being the only one out of the top three carriers that have been accepted.