News - Friday, July 9, 2010 10:05 - 11 Comments

Govt doesn’t trust “internet companies”, says Conroy

The Federal Government doesn’t trust large internet companies — which he said were solely interested in profit — to regulate their own sector, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said yesterday in response to questions about the Government’s mandatory internet filter policy.

At a press event at the headquarters of the National Broadband Network headquarters in Sydney, Conroy was asked whether the classification system for online content should be different from that for other mediums such as newspapers or television.

“It’s a communications system. It’s not magic. I know there are people who like to give it magical properties, net utopians think that it should be completely unregulated,” Conroy said. “This government and many other governments around the world don’t accept that argument.”

“We’re not prepared to trust big internet companies whose sole basis of operation is profit motive, it’s not a model that has ever worked long term on a range of issues … take the privacy debate, where some companies say trust us. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to have worked out too well.”

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