It seems that there is a significant amount of opposition to the Australian federal government’s commitment to put a mandatory Internet filter in place in this country. Google and Yahoo, as well as civil libertarian groups have raised serious concerns for the heavy-handed approach to filtering Internet content that is set to be put into place by as early as next year. Experts have also raised the issue that a mandatory Internet filter will effectively slow Internet speeds and increase the costs of providing Internet access. So how will the filter affect Australian businesses? This article should help to clarify how the proposed filter may affect businesses that are reliant on Internet technology.
What Is The Australian Internet Filter? There have been several content filtering models proposed by the Federal government over the past several years. The government filter has progressed from a subsidised pc based filter in the form of a selection of filtering software that uses a government blacklist to a mandatory ISP based filtering system that is proposed to block all content that is refused classification by ACMA. The main objective of implementing an Internet filter is to stop people from being inadvertently exposed to websites that contain child pornography or other illegal or offensive content. The government has currently budgeted around $44.5 million for the implementation of the mandatory filtering scheme.
Will the Filter Work? Enex Testlab, the company responsible for the live pilot testing regime of the government filter produced a
report that showed that the filter would significantly impact Internet speeds. While simply filtering against a blacklist impacted speeds by up to 17%, further filtering of additional content categories, as well as technology used to stop circumvention of the filter had larger impacts on speed.
The report also shows that high traffic websites like YouTube and Facebook could overload the filter.
The filter would also fail to entirely prevent attempt to circumvent it according to many experts. It only blocks websites and not peer to peer file sharing networks and a large number of students are aware of how to circumvent school based filters very easily.
The other problem is the blacklist itself. The contents of the blacklist are kept secret by the government to stop people from going to the banned sites. In March 2009, whistle-blower website Wikileaks.org made the government blacklist available for download, a move strongly condemned by the Australian government who threatened to prosecute any website owner that provided a link on their website to Wikileaks. The blacklist contained over 2000 websites, most of which were related to child pornography and other offensive material, but there were also links to rank-and-file pornography, YouTube videos, poker sites, WikiLeaks entries and even URLs to a Queensland dentist and dog-boarding kennel. Because we citizens are not allowed to know which websites are blacklisted or not or who is affected, there is little chance for remedy if mistakes are made and website operators may disappear off the web without any idea that they were blacklisted by the government.
Less Internet Providers Means Less Choice The Government’s mandatory filter will add to ISP costs, including software and hardware, installation, maintenance and especially customer service. Costs are also dependant on if the government enforced ISPs to actually make the filter work. If there were penalties for not filtering to a certain standard this would force ISPs to spend more on censorship. Add to this the potential damage to an ISPs brand reputation due to falsely filtering websites and degraded service performance, this government intervention would put enormous pressure on the industry. This will most likely squeeze many of the smaller players out of the ISP business, something that can only be good for large providers like Optus and Telstra.
Alternative Strategies
The mandatory Internet filter has for the past two years been presented by the government as the only viable option to protect Australian citizens, with a focus on children, from the more sordid aspects of the World Wide Web. The scheme that was implemented under the Howard regime seemed to make more sense. This scheme made PC-based filtering software freely available for anyone who wanted it, allowing each Australian household the choice of having their Internet content filtered or not. This also meant that you could add offensive websites to the software’s own blacklist that also contained the government blacklisted sites.
A regulatory regime for illegal online content also exists within our legal system. Our code of laws already criminalises most of what the filter seeks to filter out. Rather than spend so much tax payers money on schemes that are not only expensive, but do not provide an effective deterrent to criminality on the Internet and can easily be wielded as a weapon against legitimate dissenting views, perhaps this money could be spent on increasing actual police work in the form of investigations and operations that will bring real criminals to justice.
Most web hosting providers will respond to court ordered take down notices, and Google has responded to moves by our and other governments to censor the Internet with an announcement on April 21st 2010 that they are now providing publicly available statistics on government requests to remove content from Google. Google’s announcement on its official Australian blog site stated that it already removes content that has been requested by court order or if it does not meet its own strict acceptable content rules.
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