- One of the internet's pioneers
- $36 billion is "stunning investment"
- Filter net at production end, not distribution
ONE of the internet's founding fathers says he's "jealous" of Australia's $36 billion broadband network.
Vint Cerf, who helped develop email and TCP/IP technology, told The Australian during a visit to Sydney yesterday he thought the NBN was a "stunning investment".
"I continue to feel a great deal of envy because in the US our broadband infrastructure is nothing like what Australia has planned," he said.
Now Google's chief web evangelist, Dr Cerf was, however, not so kind towards Prime Minister Julia Gillard's bid to censor the internet, saying it was not an "effective move".
The Federal Government wants to force every ISP to filter websites rated with a refused classification tag, in accordance with a secret government blacklist.
Dr Cerf's advice was to instead attack the source of a problem at the production end, instead of focusing on its distribution.
"This (policy) is an understandable desire to be protective of society, but technically I don't think it's a very effective move," Dr Cerf said.
"The argument that there's bad information out there and therefore we should somehow supress it - one counter argument is the antidote 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."
Dr 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 said.
The question to ask was: "Who is putting that information out in the first place? That's the place to attack the problem."
Read more about Vint Cerf's thoughts on the internet in Australia at The Australian
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