Some insight on compulsory internet filtering
This is a cross-post of this article on WiFi in Australia (which is mine, so I’m not plagiarising 
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Last week, Insight on SBS hosted a really interesting forum to debate the compulsory internet filter that has been proposed by Senator Stephen Conroy and the incumbent Australian government.
You can watch the entire SBS broadcast here:
Insight - Blocking the net (click to play)
The proposal aims to introduce a level of compulsory internet filtering at the ISP level throughout the country to deny access to any non peer-2-peer material at has been refused classification by the Classification board or otherwise deemed illegal.
The debate offered by Insight has representation from a number of different camps. The for’s and against’s seem to be fairly evenly balanced in the program which is nice to see.
Representatives included (in a very rough order of appearance):
- Senator Stephen Conroy
- Sue Mclean (Cyber Safety Advisor)
- Colin Jacobs (Electronic Fontiers Australia)
- Mark Newton (ISP Network Engineer – Internode)
- Some Christian guy that spouted rubbish that had nothing to do with the debate
- and parents, both for and against.
Now, to get opinionated, I don’t believe that a compulsory filter is the answer.
I don’t have a wealth of statistics to back up my claim here, but I do have a fairly educated opinion given a high exposure and familiarity to the online medium. And my belief is that for the material they are talking about I would strongly argue that the vast majority of it is distributed through peer-to-peer networks, encrypted channels and by ‘old-fashioned’ email. And none of these methods would be filtered with the currently proposed scheme.
The end result is that people who are running these illegal material rings will still distribute it amongst themselves, the others who want to access it online will circumvent the filter, leaving the rest of us with a infrastructure-heavy filtering system that is filtering out content that we aren’t even trying to access anyway.
And the bit in bold there is the key thing.
Why put in a compulsory filter to stop people accessing material that they aren’t even going to try to access? Sure, their kids might try to get there or stumble upon it, so in those cases offer an opt-in filter that they can choose to run their connection through. The argument that it will stop those that want to access illegal material from doing so is ridiculous. This is a situation where, if there is a will, there is a way. And in this case, I imagine the ‘way’ would be a 2 minute google search…
By the way, Mike agrees with this.
Chris is a shining example of how, in a world where abortion is not as easily obtained as a leg of fried chicken, an ounce of prevention can be worth more than its weight in gold. He is currently completing a PhD in Bioinformatics which he hopes may one day help him get out of a speeding ticket.