Expensive Government Net Nanny

Net Nanny can be bought for $27 and does an effective job at filtering out objectionable content from the internet. A good, cheap, and effective tool for any concerned parent. The Australian Government, of course, knows better and decided to filter the internet at the national level with the curious option of opting in. From Dans Data:

The Government predicted that 2.5 million households, about 31% of the whole country, would want their free copy of one or another of the packages (which they'd paid for with their taxes already, of course).

As it turns out, they got a grand total of 144,088 CD orders and downloads.

And not all of the people who got the filter software bothered to use it. The ridiculously-named government department responsible says only about 29,000 of the packages were actually installed.

That's 1.2% of the target, for those of you keeping score at home.

The total price of the software filter scheme was 85 million Australian dollars. That's about $US78 million, at current exchange rates.

So this software ended up costing the taxpayer about $AU2930 ($US2685) per installed unit.

A copy of Net Nanny will cost you $US27 from Amazon. That's almost exactly one per cent of the effective price of the "free" software.

How futile can you get in buying off a minor, and wrong, special interest group.
Lyn: I saw the same figures in a piece at Unleashed a while ago. I'd love to know how many kids managed to find their way around the small number of packages that did get installed.
Guy: Indeed. This is the worst Rudd Government policy out there at the moment, and one hopes that it will be buried quickly.

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