Tales From Beyond The Grave: The Internet Filter.

I had really, truly believed that the Internet Filter was dead and buried. My last post about it was back in September last year and since then I’ve failed to come across anything solid about it apart from Conroy saying that he was still committed to the idea. It’s a good thing really since Australia didn’t appear to really want it and it wouldn’t have been effective anyway but the lack of an official release from the government saying that the idea had been canned meant that the Internet Filter always had a small chance of resurrecting itself. Indeed the much bigger issues facing Australia would seem to have the Internet Filter well buried, leaving us to leave that ugly part of Australia’s past behind us.

Unfortunately for us however it seems that nothing is as unkillable as an election promise to appease a vocal minority and 4 Australian Internet service providers have implemented their own form of what the Internet filter was to become:

MOST Australian internet users will have their web access censored next month after the country’s two largest internet providers agreed to voluntarily block more than 500 websites from view.

Telstra and Optus confirmed they would block access to a list of child abuse websites provided by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and more compiled by unnamed international organisations from mid-year.

…

“The ACMA will compile and manage a list of URLs of child abuse content that will include the appropriate subsection of the ACMA blacklist as well as child abuse URLs that are provided by reputable international organisations (to be blocked),” the spokesman said.

It seems that whilst the funding for a “mandatory voluntary” filter was indeed dropped in this year’s budget due to limited interest (or was that outright hatred?) the notion of a voluntary filter paid for entirely by the ISPs themselves was still on the table. Strangely enough 4 ISPs agreed to this idea including Telstra and Optus, two companies not known for doing things out of the good of their hearts unless they’re legislated to. I have no idea what their motivations are for doing so either since it just means more work for them without providing any sort of benefit to their end customers. Hell I don’t think this will generate any good will either as most people using these ISPs will be completely unaware of the changes.

They’re also implementing a filter that’s going to be completely ineffectual. Basically it’s just a simple list of URLs to be blocked, curated by ACMA and apparently they’re all sites that contain child abuse material on them. Such a filter disregards the fact that the vast majority of people attempting to access material like this aren’t going to be deterred by the simple fact the URL is blocked, especially when it’s trivial to change the URL at a moment’s notice. Additionally blocking URLs does nothing to stymie the distribution of such material through peer to peer networks and would more than likely drive more of them to use such services. In essence this is nothing more than a complete waste of time for everyone involved and really only serves as a political talking point.

The government and all ISPs involved could do themselves a huge favor by just dropping this idea entirely. It is politically toxic, ineffectual and above all has the potential to be misused in ways that could do Australia a great deal of harm both locally and internationally. Hopefully this is the last time that the Internet Filter will crawl out of its grave to give us one last scare but as they say the price for freedom is eternal vigilance and I’ll be ready with my shotgun should the bloated corpse of the Internet Filter dare try to rise again.