ACMA report finds little to support Conroy's enthusiasm for ISP filtering

Stuart Corner
Monday, 25 February 2008 05:54

Opinion and Analysis

In other words, it would be pretty ineffective in "providing protection for children from Internet websites containing harmful content." The ACMA notes also that other commercially developed indexes of web sites "may contain millions of URLs divided into categories" and applying Cleanfeed to such a large index would result in significant performance degradation.

For devotees of large scale ISP level filtering such as senator Conroy, the ACMA's report is not encouraging. "Without substantially augmenting the processing capability of its existing hardware, an appreciable reduction in network performance is inevitable." The ACMA report notes that, in 2005 an RMIT test of commercially available filtering and blocking technologies available to ISPs, RMIT's test lab found performance degradation of between 18 and 78 percent.

In its report the ACMA examines in some detail approaches to online safety adopted by the EU noting that it and its member states have been "early movers in the area of mitigating online risk and stand as an example of one way to develop online safety measures in response to changing online risk [and] the EU is nearly unique in th world in having developed and articulated a series of programmes aimed at addressing the full range of identifiable online risks in a comprehensive and integrated manner."

The ACMA's review of EU initiative does not suggest that Europe is overly enamoured of ISP level filtering. It does suggest a strong emphasis on education, awareness raising, research into filtering techniques and how they can be effectively employed by end users.

Contrary to what Conroy's press release suggests, nowhere in the ACMA report does there appear to be any reference to an effective wide ranging ISP filtering or blocking implementation.

The report does, however provide a very comprehensive and useful examination of a wide range of options available to government, ISPs and end users to achieve the very desirable goals of preventing the distribution of illegal content on the Internet and of shielding children from material that is undesirable or inappropriate.

Australia could learn a great deal from an inclusive and open investigation of this full range of options in Australia, but unfortunately the government seems to fixated on one outcome: ISP level filtering.

 As the minister said: "The Government is undertaking a number of activities to inform the development of an implementation framework for ISP filtering, including extensive consultation with industry and examining overseas models."

There are almost no models presented for examination by the ACMA's report. Maybe they just don't work.