As I reported in my previous post, the Internet filtering trial in Australia was due to commence on Christmas Eve.
Well, up to only a few days prior to that deadline, ISPs which had expressed interest in participating in the trials still hadn’t received notification from the government as to their acceptance into the program.
This revelation came as no surprise to most of us watching this circus, as it typifies the government’s disorganisation and lack of understanding of the issues involved.
One reason for the delay in selecting participants is probably the fact that the government has made a last-minute extension to exactly what the filters will attempt to examine and exclude.
After months of ignoring industry advice that the filtering as originally designed would not be able to examine peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic, apparently someone in Senator Conroy’s office finally figured out what “peer-to-peer” and “BitTorrent” are, and at the last minute they have been tacked on to the specifications.
Senator Conroy recently announced: “A number of applications have been received from ISPs expressing interest in participating in the field pilot of ISP content filtering”.
Now, while I don’t doubt for a moment that many ISPs have expressed interest in participating, to the best of my knowledge there is not a single Australian ISP in favour of the proposed filtering system.
A difference between many of the ISPs at the moment is that a few have been very vocal in their condemnation of the filtering plans and have made it quite clear they are only interested in participating in the trial so as to prove that it won’t work without serious detriment to the performance of broadband in Australia.
Most outspoken of the vocal opponents has been managing director of iiNet, Michael Malone.
Malone confirmed he would sign up to be involved in the government’s “ridiculous” trials, but stressed that his main purpose was to gather “hard numbers” to demonstrate “how stupid it is”, referring to widespread contention that the filters would not work as intended, would be simple to bypass, would not filter peer-to-peer traffic (statement made prior to peer-to-peer filtering being tacked on to the trial specification) and would significantly degrade network speeds. “They’re not listening to the experts, they’re not listening to the industry, they’re not listening to consumers, so perhaps some hard numbers will actually help,” he said. “Every time a kid manages to get through this filter, we’ll be publicising it and every time it blocks legitimate content, we’ll be publicising it.”
Malone concluded with the observation: “This is the worst Communications Minister we’ve had in the 15 years since the industry has existed.”
Other ISPs have quietly applied for participation, keeping their motives to themselves and without issuing provocative comments.
Now given that the apparently duplicitous Senator Conroy clearly wants to see Internet censorship implemented regardless of technical advice to the contrary, we all should be very concerned that the blatantly antagonistic ISPs not be excluded from the trial. We need to hear genuine, un-doctored results from a broad spectrum of qualified participants, not just those that the confused and misinformed Senator Conroy thinks might be “quiet adopters” of his ill-conceived plan.
Anyway, the end result is that Conroy has now pushed the technical trials back into 2009. “The pilot trial will not begin until mid-January and an announcement regarding participants will be made at that time.”
Dear reader, regardless of what country you call home, be alert to the fact that government-sponsored moves to censor the Internet will almost assuredly appear in your region sooner or later. Watch what is happening in other countries so you can be better prepared to defend your own rights when they are threatened.
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