Internet filter clogged with regurgitated policies

By Stuart Corner
Monday, 13 August 2007 11:42

Opinion and Analysis

John Howard and Helen Coonan really must think the electorate and the Australian media totally bereft of any collective memory. How else could it hope to get away with the regurgitation of discredited policies and unfulfilled promises that passes for the latest $119m 'protecting families' online initiative?

The Electronic Frontiers Australia response says it all: "This 'initiative' is nothing more than a tiresome repeat of previously announced and abandoned policies, and comes before the government has even conducted their recently-announced feasibility study of ISP-level filtering."

"The government has also failed to implement their National Filter Scheme, first announced in June 2006 and aimed at providing free PC-based filters, and they have now announced it once again. The minister has no credibility in this matter... This announcement is a rehash of a Labor rehash of a discredited Howard government policy; and when Labor rehashed it, Senator Coonan rightly denounced it as being a waste of money."

When the ALP in March 2006 unveiled its policy to require all ISPs to provide ISP-side filtering, Coonan was quick to respond: "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.

Coonan went on to explain: "The NetAlert trial was conducted by researchers from RMIT as part of the Government-funded Launceston Broadband Program, in partnership with ACMA and with the assistance of Telstra. The final report will be released shortly but the preliminary findings of the trial include that: All server-level filters tested had a major impact on network performance ranging from an 18 per cent degradation for the best performing filter to 78 per cent on the worst performing; and The server-level filters perform adequately at slower speeds, for the faster upstream connections that are common in larger ISPs, the performance degraded significantly."