Is the Rudd Government going to be the new cyber bully?

I'm at a loss to understand exactly why the Federal Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy is so hot for Internet filtering at service provider level, if his aim is actually to protect children with PC clean feed access but not to impact on other users.

From 1999 onwards the Federal Government has been told that this preferred method of filtering has problems.

 

A September 1999 CSIRO commissioned study outlines what appears to remain ongoing problems with Senator Conroy's current plan to apply blanket internet censorship. 

 

"The disadvantages include:

• Performance impacts including increased delays and reduced capacity.
• Costs of installing and administering suitable filtering systems.
• Limited effectiveness.
• Potential impact on all Internet users.

ISP-based filtering may prove to be difficult to implement on a large scale because of the very nature and size of the Internet. Any delays or access restrictions imposed by ISP filtering mechanisms can have an impact on all Internet traffic, on e-commerce and business as well as on educational or recreational Web browsing."

 

"ISPs are concerned not only with delays imposed on individual messages as they pass through the filter but also with any associated limitations that the filtering workload will place on total system capacity. Excessive delays will degrade the overall useability of the Internet and may make some delay-sensitive Internet applications, such as Internet telephony, infeasible altogether."

 

"There is no single, 'good' technology that could be adopted by all ISPs to filter Internet content."

 

"ISPs implementing content filtering also have to be concerned with introducing instability into their networks and reducing the overall reliability of their services. Reliability and availability are critically important to ISPs and their customers, especially as the Internet takes on the role of providing the data communications infrastructure for the nation. ISPs currently use 'telecommunications grade' equipment designed to be exceptionally reliable (99.999% availability). The kinds of standard computers and software used to implement filtering are more general-purpose and complex, and are unlikely to be as reliable. The computers will, in many cases, be directly in the path between users and the Internet and the failure of a filtering computer would then have the effect of blocking access to the Internet rather than temporarily allowing access to prohibited material."

 

These same problems were still found to exist according to the February 2008 ACMA study, commissioned by the previous Coalition Minister for Communications and on which Senator Conroy now relies.

 

It is looking suspiciously as though, in Senator Conroy's case, ideology is outweighing commonsense when it comes to a desire to censor the world wide web.

 

This push also appears to be at odds with the Rudd Government's boast that it will supply a faster broadband service.

Indeed, Senator Conroy is beginning to come across as a bit of a cyber bully in his approach to telecommunications companies.