| Most of the ISPs in
these lists are drawn from the logs of this web server. This list is not
supposed to be encyclopaedic. But it does provide some useful starting
points. This page has had 85 hits between 2 and 28 May 1999. That's only about 100 hits per month. The average hit rate for the first 2.5 weeks of December 1999 was 208 hits/month. The average for March/April 2000 was about 213 hits/month. The average for July 2000 was 385 hits/month. On 25 August 1999, after maintaining my own list on the web for about 8 months, I checked out Kim Davies' ISP list, which someone had just told me about. His list is much bigger and better than my list. However, there are many ISPs in my list which are not in his list. My Australian list is all on one page. And I have an international list too. So there. I have heard estimates of the number of ISPs in Australia of 600 and 800. I guess that the 800 number is closer to the truth at December 1999. |
| Note on ISP
censorship On 26 May 1999, the Australian back-to-the-50s, so-called `Liberal' Party government passed a law through the Senate to censor the Internet. From January 2000, all material on Australian web servers, and all information coming in from overseas on the Internet, must be censored in real-time. Any ISP who refuses to comply will be fined A$27,000 per day after about 2 days' warning in the case of any individual file on their servers or external URL or IP address that they do not block. (The current so-called `Liberal' government is in fact an authoritarian government. They believe that regular spankings all round will keep everyone happy and respectful. They're right, actually.) Australia has hereby lost the moral authority to criticise any regime which takes away the freedom of expression of its own people. The new law will also cripple the growth of electronic business in Australia. A campaign was mounted to stop the new law, but the bad guys won. (See also my Internet censorship links.) Australia must now give up its aspiration to become a clever country, since we will now be branded as the `global village idiot'. Knowledgeable people in the Internet community in Australia tried to stop the new law, but we couldn't find anyone in the government who could understand even the rudiments of internet technology. They think that the Internet is the same as cable TV or something. But the current conservative/regressive federal Australian government follows the `elected dictatorship' model of government adopted by Thatcher in Britain. Anybody setting up an ISP from now on will have to acquire and operate ineffective real-time censoring software or else be fined A$27,000 per day, in addition to the burden of collecting the new GST tax for the government. Australia must now accept ubiquitous surveillance by government
authorities who are politically biased in favour of the status quo.
Asserting government sovereignty over the Internet is just one step in
asserting complete control over communications of every kind, as in the
USA, where government surveillance is now at a level which could only be
dreamt of by Ceausescu's Romania. We won the cold war so as to be free
of totalitarianism, but totalitarianism is being imposed now on both the
USA and Australia because the general population have no understanding
of these things. If the politicians have nothing to hide, they should all have webcams (for both visible and infra-red) installed in their bedrooms so that we can keep an eye on them. After all, if they're doing nothing wrong, what have they got to hide? |
The look-and-feel of this page (`sky-blue banana' colour
scheme) is
Copyright (C) 1999, Alan Kennington.
