Hi there everyone...
You might have heard that the Australian Government under Senator Steven Conroy has started working on a proposed "ISP Level Internet Filtering" system.
Under this new scheme, ISP's (the people who sell you your Internet Access) will be required by law to filter your internet, and block out sites that are determined by the Australian Government.
While we can accept that there are some unsavoury sides to the Internet - there are a one main of aspect to this plan that gets my hackles up, and makes me scared. It is basically that there will be two filters - one you can "opt out" of , but the second filter is mandatory, can cannot be removed.
This means that the government gets to choose what we can see and read on the Internet, with no recourse, debate accountability or process control. It is blatant and unreserved censorship of information.
While Senator Conroy says that this will only be used to block illegal or "unwanted" content in Australia - the fact is that trials conducted have proven that this technology actually slows down the Internet speed, and produces "false positives". This means that some harmless and potentially valuable sites will be blocked unintentionally.
Secondly - at no stage has Senator Conroy disclosed what he means by "unwanted" content! We could actually be empowering our government to block whatever content they like!
Yes - it is most certainly looking like the "great firewall of China" that was internationally criticised during the last Olympic games.
Here are some points to note:
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all trials to date so some degradation / slowing of internet speeds - this is contrary to Gvt policy/programs to improve speed in Australia
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all trial show a degree of "false positives" - which means that legitimate content will be inadvertently censored. You may call it "collateral damage" to the cause, but as you can't pick what is accidentally being censored, it is not right for governments to impose this.
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this technology must make ISP services more expensive - unless ongoing subsidies from the Gvt are provided. basically there are new systems to be maintained, new support calls to be answered by customers etc.. This has a real and unavoidable labour cost at best.
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the filtering technology proposed can be bypassed at any time by using a techniques such as anonymous proxies and secure VPN tunnels. This is not difficult to do. So effectively people trying to get around it can, but legitimate users have their internet made slower and more expensive, and can't trust that they are getting the whole story
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the filtering technology proposed only blocks HTTP traffic. The largest volume of traffic on the internet today is peer to peer and email.
All of our nations major Internet Service Providers (ISP's) have spoken out against the plan, but the government seem to discount their advice saying they have a vested interest in keeping the Internet unblocked as they will make more more money.
This argument is ridiculous when you understand the technology. ISP's report that between 50 - 85% of their traffic (and hence revenue) is from peer to peer traffic. This form of traffic would be unhindered by the proposed internet filtering. When you add other traffic such as instant messaging and email, the majority of revenue base would be unaffected. Saying that ISP's have a vested interest just doesn't hold water - it actually sounds silly.
Nothing seems to stack up - so the only question I have is "why" ? What is really driving this process.
Some links to this debate:
http://www.somebodythinkofthechildren.com/http://www.efa.org.au/http://www.nocleanfeed.com/
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