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The Sydney Morning Herald reports the Australian communications regulator said you can be fined $11,000 per day for linking to sites that are on their banned list. This is going to begin shortly, even though there is a lot of criticism over the news.
Link building has never been so scary, or has it? ;-)
It seems like this blacklist is a secret and the sites you are not allowed to link to, well - are only known to the regulators. So if you do link to one of these sites, you may not even know it and you may be fined for it. I assume most of the links are illegal sites, such as child pornography and the like, but some may not be that obvious, as watchdog groups claim.
A WebmasterWorld thread has comments on this new regulation.
So lemme get this straight, if your site is hosted in Australia, you are not allowed to link to these 1300+ sites, but they're not going to tell you who they are?
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Gavin Smith
03/17/2009 02:51 pm
I'm guessing these could / will quite easily be over turned in a court room if they refuse to make the list public.
Ben Pfeiffer
03/17/2009 06:19 pm
I am really glad I don't live in Australia.
Simone Icough
03/18/2009 11:18 am
@Ben Pfeiffer you said it, I am glad we don't live there also, seems a bit one sided if you ask me, fair enough the child porno ones should be obvious but are they? If you don't know that you are linking to a bad site it seems a but unfair to be fined, not really all for one and one for all is it!