iiNet pulls out of "fundamentally flawed" filtering trial

Stuart Corner
Monday, 23 March 2009 07:58

IT Industry - Market

The government's planned trial of ISP side Internet filtering has suffered a severe setback with one of Australia's largest ISPs, iiNet, backing out of an early offer to participate in the planned trials citing constant changes in the policy, confused explanations of the purpose of the trial and revelations regarding the supposed 'blacklist'.

CEO Michael Malone said the company had only ever agreed to participate in order to demonstrate that the policy was fundamentally flawed, a waste of taxpayers' money and would not work, but that after protracted negotiations the the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), iiNet had been unable to reach agreement.

"We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship," Malone said. "It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as 'unwanted material' without an explanation of what that includes."

He claimed that "this trial and policy is not the solution or even about [child pornography...In reality, the vast majority of online child pornography activity does not appear on public websites but is distributed over peer-to-peer networks which are not and cannot be captured by this trial or policy."
 
Malone said "the Government should re-think its approach and urgently needs to make clear what its intentions are in respect of Internet censorship. This lack of communication from government and bureaucracy is rightly seen as underhand and unsavoury and is now attracting international dismay as well as Australian disgust."

Communications minister Stephen Conroy named on 11 February the first six ISPs that had been selected to participate in the planned trial: they were Primus, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1."

ISPs had been invited to put forward proposals to participate in two pilot streams: filtering the ACMA blacklist of prohibited URLs; and filtering the ACMA blacklist of prohibited URLs along with "additional content filtering solutions that may be offered as optional services by ISPs."

The government said it was still in discussions with a number of ISPs that had applied to take part. During a Q&A session after his speech at the ATUG conference earlier this month, Conroy accused some of the applicant ISPs of making unreasonable requests of the department: of "trying to get the government to pay for their infrastructure upgrades."