Greens attack Conroy on P2P filtering

By James Riley
Thursday, 17 September 2009 08:22

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Communications Minister Stephen Conroy had “shifted the goalposts” in the debate on the internet filtering of peer to peer traffic, Greens senator Scott Ludlam has claimed.

As part of his long running spat over mandatory net filtering proposals, Senator Ludlam says the Minister had previously written that the technology existed to filter peer to peer traffic and that Government planned to test its effectiveness its during recently concluded ISP filtering trials.

But queried about P2P sharing in Question Time yesterday, Senator Conroy said "there has never been a suggestion by this government that peer-to-peer traffic would or could be blocked by our filter," and accused Senator Ludlam of trying to mislead the Senate and public.

Senator Ludlam said this was a demonstration of "quiet goalpost-shifting."  He argued the whole filtering plan was misguided and had caused enormous disquiet among internet users.

"It has created quite a bit of disquiet in the online community. "(The policy) doesn’t appear to be targeted at any particular issue," Senator Ludlam told iTWire.

"They have acknowledged that peer to peer traffic is where most of the traffic that they are trying to target is conveyed. And now (Senator Conroy) he confirmed (in Question Time) that they are not trying to target peer to peer traffic – that the policy is just about blocking a portion of websites on the internet that are on the ACMA blacklist," he said.

Senator Conroy’s office said the Minister had been referring – when he said in Question Time P2P filtering had never been considered by Government – to the mandatory part of the filter proposal (Refused Classification content).

P2P had been included in the second part of the live trials, according to the call for Expressions of Interest, as an option for ISPs to consider. ISPs could put forward proposals to test the effectiveness of P2P filtering if they wanted.

Regardless, Senator Ludlam says the filtering plan was a solution looking for a problem.

"We received another vivid demonstration (in the Senate) yesterday of why people are right to be suspicious of this pointless waste of $44 million," he said.

"The Greens support measures that will achieve better protection for children from objectionable online material, but Minister Conroy reminded us again that the mandatory internet filtering scheme started out as ill-conceived and has just gone downhill from there."