Australia Internet Filter Trial
Word has been going around for some time now that Australia may implement an Internet filter which would choose what content Australians would be allowed to view online. With results from the latest Internet filtering trial indicating filters have had little effect on the speed of the Internet, many ISPs seem quite content to start serving filtered content.
An Australia-wide Internet filter could be implemented in a way most users would likely find reasonable - eg. by only blocking access to content that would be illegal to consume anyway (such as child pornography or websites facilitating illegal downloading). Unfortunately, not only does the slippery slope argument apply but Australia’s Internet filter may go far beyond that if content is filtered by ISPs in accordance with ACMA Internet regulation. Australian content is already heavily regulated, however it could get a whole lot worse with content from anywhere possibly being blacklisted in Australia.
Not residing in Australia myself, I only know what I’ve come across on the Internet — if anyone from Australia wants to fill us in on what’s going down, that would be most appreciated. To see ISPs volunteering to take part in this trial is worrisome — Australia is a democratic country and if it can happen there, who’s to say it can’t happen in Canada or the USA?
Like I said earlier, it’s a slippery slope and once we start filtering content, where do we stop? Reading over the comments to the article I linked to in the first link, it’s obvious that most Australians do not want their Internet filtered.
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July 25th, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Unfortunately, this issue is getting pathetic media coverage. Practically nil. Stephen Conroy, the minister in charge of communications, he repeatedly lied about the scope of the policy. See http://newmatilda.com/polliegraph/?p=567 for further details about his lies. The government has commissioned a ‘live pilot’ where they will attempt to determine how much of a performance hit the censorware will make. The trial is a sham. In order to test how a mandatory filter will perform, they insist that:
The trial is opt-in for both ISPs and customers
They are not testing how it will perform when the internet changes to IPv6
Not releasing the success or failure criteria - to which there appears none
Using such small samples - 1 test ISP had 15 customers (1%) trialling it
No blind or double blind testing
Only testing about 1000 URLs when in reality, they will block all ‘prohibited’ content when ranges all the way down to MA15+ not behind an age verification screen
Not testing how the system will cope when high traffic URLs are added - no YouTube, Wikipedia or other high profile URLs are evident in the trial blacklist, but are evident in the leaked blacklist.
There is zero scientific accuracy in the trials, and of course they will be declared a ’success’. The censorship laws in this country sicken me, and if this policy comes in, we will be the laughing stock of the ‘democratic’ world.
Which country do you reside?
July 26th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Hi Ben,
Thank you for the further information on what’s going on in Australia. I’m from Canada, however with all the spying the USA is already doing on it’s own citizens and Canada’s tendency to follow whatever the USA does, it’s something I could see being implemented here in the not too distant future.
July 26th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Democracies of the world are becoming a “joke”, but one that isn’t funny, we always believe that our freedom is a sure thing, but little by little many governments are implementing a lot of controling mechanisms all over the place. The internet is something that has always scared political power because they had very little control, but they’re slowly taking that control, and we’re letting because they start with things that everyone agrees like child pornography, but from those things they start controling others.
July 26th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I completely agree Helder — well said.