ISP-level filtering? No problem, says Nominum

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 21 August 2007 05:45

Business IT - Technology

US software company, Nominum, claims that its technology is able to provide ISP level content filtering with 'sub-millisecond' delays, contrary to many claims that ISP level filtering would inevitably slow down response times for web surfers.

Carl Braden, Nominum's sales director for Asia Pacific, told iTWire: "Nominum has recently developed a capability to redirect DNS queries with a 'black list' database referral that produces a sub millisecond delay to the network performance. We developed this technology as part of our ENUM based layer 7 routing technologies where database sizes are in the order of half a billion records."

He said this technology could be applied for content filtering purposes by ISP, and was already being used in this manner. "A massive black list in the order of tens of millions of domains at the DNS level can be checked and re-directed with very low network latency...We have deployed this solution - Vantio MDR (Malicious Domain Redirect) - with some of our DNS customers/ISPs in northern Europe to assist them comply with the regulatory regime around blocking child porn sites" Braden added: "The MDR blacklist database can be fed real time from multiple sources."

The product has yet to be formally launched. Braden said it would be publicly launched in the US "in a few months" adding: "We have  a number of other deployments underway."

He had nothing to report on any developments in Australia, but said: "pending the political outcome hopefully people will see that a network based solution will be the cheapest and only effective basis to provide a content filtered service."

In early 2006 when then ALP leader, Kim Beazley, proposed mandating ISP level filtering to protect the community from offensive content, communications minister Helen Coonan, disparaged the idea, saying: "According to research conducted by the Government's Internet safety organisation, NetAlert, the kind of server-based filtering proposed by Labor has been found to have a major adverse impact on network performance."

However she has since backed down from her opposition to the idea announcing first, a trial of ISP-level filleting in Tasmania and then, last week (without waiting for an assessment of the results of this trial) plans to mandate ISP level filtering.