Internet filtering? Just say no

By Stephen Withers
Monday, 10 November 2008 11:05

Opinion and Analysis

There's lots of heat and little light in the debate surrounding the Australian government's Internet censorship plan - and the minister responsible isn't helping.

Apart from the arguments that 'we're adults and we should be able to decide what we and our children can access on the Internet' and 'censorship is a slippery path to oppression,' most of the opposition comes from two perspectives.

One is that content filtering will impose too great a burden on ISPs, the other is that any such filter is too ineffective or easily circumvented to be worthwhile.

Much was made of the report [PDF] from the the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) that found filtering could sap performance by as much as 86 percent, but less attention was given to the finding that "one product generated almost no network degradation and the remaining three products exhibited low to moderate levels of degradation in network performance [page 5]."

As far as I can tell from the report, the best performing product in terms of network traffic was one of the worst in terms of not blocking content that should have been blocked, yet wasn't the best in terms of overblocking. Not very promising.

But is this the sort of filtering that the government has in mind? Most commercial filters - whether designed for use at gateways or on individual PCs use blacklists compiled by the vendor concerned and are intended to appeal to those that want to keep 'unacceptable' material out.

Stephen Conroy, the federal minister for communications, recently told ABC Radio National's The Media Report "But what we've committed to do is practically implement what's on the blacklist [of content refused classification by the ACMA] at the moment, if it is technically feasible."

Such a blacklist would, I imagine, be far more acceptable to 'average Australians' than one compiled by a vendor in another country that is motivated by a different set of cultural and religious norms than those that prevail here - but that's not to say a majority would actually find it acceptable.

And just because a party goes to an election with a particular set of policies (including one calling for Internet filtering), it cannot claim a mandate for each and every one of those policies if it is elected.

Furthermore, Conroy did leave the door open to a significant expansion of the range of material that would be blocked: "a whole range of people have said, 'Hey, let's expand this'. That's a debate that we will come to," he said.

What about the ability to bypass any filters? Please read on.