[dmharrison]

As someone just getting started with my own small tech company I find this quite alarming.  I particularly find the technical cluelessness of senator Conroy the most disturbing thing.  With technical absolutes that the filter will be ineffectual and easily bypassed and an impediment to broadband speeds it seems to be just ignored and the technological costs are treated as malleable when they're not. My main fear is that when this is found to not be effective protecting children or stemming child porn it won't be removed, rather will be extended and creep deeper and deeper into our infrastructure.

It just means whenever I look for hosting, internet services etc it means I'm already deliberately using services not based in Aus which I think will be a long term trend and detriment to the technology industry here. Just adding latency to any service as it has an extra few hops through the filter is a cost I wouldn't expect customers to bare.

The impact on Australia's technical reputation I think is the major thing.  Previously travelling a bit and being involved in a US-AUS acquisition; Australians tended to be pretty well respected technologically, and with this, I fear that we're going to have that reputation quashed and look like luddites.

I plan on writing a series of letters to the ministers and chronicling the results if anyone's interested.  I also encourage any other fellow aussies to do the same.  Here's some good tips on writing letters to parliamentarians and get a good chance of reply http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/lobby.html and this one for the more subversive http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/16/dont-waste-your-time-was...