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Deloitte: ISP filter won't affect Australian businesses

Analyst predicts ISPs will need to adapt, but overall Australian commerce won’t be affected
Tags | ISPs | Deloittes | content filtering

A Deloitte analyst has predicted the Government’s controversial ISP filter will have minimal long-term effect on Australian businesses.

Speaking at the launch of the consulting firm’s Predictions 2010 reports in Sydney today, technology, media and telecommunications partner, Damien Tampling, said ISPs could potentially experience some fall in business if illegal downloads were filtered by the Government.

“I would’ve thought that the percentage of content ... pulled down through any ISP is more than double digits [per cent] of the legal content,” Tampling said. “If you’re taking 20 per cent of their revenues based on traffic from illegal content, and you’re stripping that back by half, then it’s going to have a bottom-line impact for them.”

But a growing trend of ISPs partnering with content producers would balance out any potential loss in profits, the analyst said.

“What an ISP would lose in terms of data traffic and the money from that [illegal traffic] would be made up for by the capacity of the people who are producing the content to make money from commercialising it. I see it as a bit of an ecosystem,” Tampling said.

The Minister responsible for the filter’s implementation, Senator Stephen Conroy, has promised only RC-rated (refused classification) material will be filtered under the proposed system, which does not automatically include all pirated content.

Overall, Tampling said any proposed version of the filter was unlikely to negatively impact non-ISP Australian businesses.

“Corporate productivity might improve significantly! I don’t think it’ll have that much impact. I don’t think the intention of the filter is to stop people from using social networking sites as a corporate filter might. It’s more around pornographic and illegal content,” he said. “I don’t see how protecting that isn’t a good thing as long as it’s done understanding the inter-relationship it has with other parts of the market and the world.”

References show all

Comments

1

Anonymous I.T person

Wed 27/01/2010 - 15:33

Deloitte?

Deloitte ? Oh common!

Damien Tampling's Prediction is no more credible than say
a builders prediction on Interest rates.

2

AkiraDoe

Wed 27/01/2010 - 15:59

Slightly misleading...

Surely someone from Deloitte would have the foresight to learn about and understand the filtering issue in its entirety or even just simple terms like Refused Classification (RC) before weighing in on the issue.

And as far as risk management goes (their speciality), how could a glaring security issue the magnitude of a nation wide implemented filter on every single internet connection (home and business) that despite the Conroy spin has the very real chance of noticeable performance impacts and the fact that it adds another point of failure to the ISP’s networks not even get consideration.

Sure they may have only looked at revenue loss from diminished traffic due to "illegal content" being blocked (which is why I brought up their apparent knowledge gap of what "RC" is earlier, because the majority of RC content is not illegal content), but with the vast amount of legal material that falls under the RC category seemingly being omitted from their view makes their conclusion lacking any credibility at best.

What about the cost of implementation that the Government wants the industry (ISPs) to absorb? How is that not going to affect smaller ISPs or be offset by deals with content providers?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to tar Deloitte with the "Enex" brush, but when making comments about such a dangerous policy that is not in the nations best interest (however is defiantly in the Governments), or reporting on them, it is gravely irresponsible to leave out such important facts unless you wish to be part of the misinformation campaign.

3

Anonymous

Wed 27/01/2010 - 16:01

Mr Tampling paid by Rudd & Conroy???

Mr Tampling is obviously paid by the Rudd government to spin this BS. The filter will impact on companies & IT students legal ability to update their own DNS records (as stated by Telstra) as well as add extra latency to gamers & at home day-traders.

Having said all this, the filter will may increase revenue for IT companies that increase the availability of circumvention techniques for true blue Aussies. Of course, these companies may have to be foreign based - outside the legal jurisdiction of Comrade Rudd & Conroy.

4

david_ramli@idg.com.au

Wed 27/01/2010 - 16:23

Well from an overall Australian business POV, I reckon he's right. ISPs might get nailed but how will the filter hit John Doe SMB or Rio Tinto? It won't really.

Not a giant fan of filter, but the dude's right.

5

Asmo

Wed 27/01/2010 - 16:39

Erm, as one of those businesses...

I can say that the added latency will have an effect.

Why? Because we already use a filtering solution and despite having good hardware and a relatively new product, we experience notable lag on proxy which isn't present off. This is repeatable and only get's worse when the system is under load.

Now we're going to have an external filter as well to add more latency. Yay. And we can't decommission our own filter because our management insists on stricter policies (keyword filtering etc) than the government intends to implement...

Which doesn't even touch how wrong the issues of nationwide censorship is, or that businesses (as already demonstrated) may be effected by being BLOCKED by the filter incorrectly...

I'd suggest Damien Tampling needs to talk to some systems admins for businesses that run filtering and see what the real world effects are before he goes making comments that he cannot back up...

6

Anonymous

Wed 27/01/2010 - 16:49

Worth mentioning you have no more security

To filter all content for this blacklist, they also have to filter secured and encrypted packets too (HTTPS), which means the latencyi s exponentially multiplied depending on the amount of data you're sending, not to mention that once the data is cracked, your secured banking data, business transactions, whatever, are now UNSECURED and wide open for your ISP or anyone along the way to exploit.

Granted the original secured packet WILL reach the end in it's secured state, but it wont get out of australia without being decrypted and analysed by the telecommunications companies

7

Andrew

Wed 27/01/2010 - 17:03

Massive misconception

Why is it that these 'analysts' consistently fail to understand the businesses of ISP's?
ISP's do not make money from heavy downloaders or the people that view large numbers of webpages, they make money out of people that buy their service then use it less.

This is consistently mis-represented.

8

Anonymous

Wed 27/01/2010 - 22:14

Deloitte sells its soul to the devil - so whats new

While ever Deloitte's make millions of dollars every year from its government contracts, comments like the one's in this article will be treated with the contempt they deserve.
http://www.deloitte.com/view/en_AU/au/industries/governmentservices/index.htm

9

IT Strategist

Wed 27/01/2010 - 22:26

Presumably he didn't read Conroy's report by Enex TestLab

According to Conroy's press release, the performance of the filtering is not “70 times less than a blink of an eye”. However read the Enex TestLab report and you'll discover that this was the Telstra assessment of their filtering and not Enex's TestLab.

Read the Enex report further and you'll see in some cases it took 36.4% longer to download a webpage (“participant5”).

Also a 20.5-22.5% decrease in performance of Internet upload speeds can be expected (“participant 5” and “participant 8”).

So what can we conclude from this? The government and advisors are doing what they do best - cherry picking "soundbite" type facts and ignoring inconvenient truths.

10

Mike Fitzsimon

Sun 31/01/2010 - 07:29

Slow Page Load = Low Google Page Rank = Commercial Disadvantage

I think there's an important factor that Mr Tampling has missed altogether.

It has become clear over the past few months that Google is now placing a higher importance on "Page Load Speed" when calculating Page Rank - the all-important score that gets my business near the top of page 1 of Google search results.

My Australian website, hosted in Australia, will be crawled by the googlebot through an Australian ISP. Conroy says it will load "a blink of an eye" slower, but this is an eternity to the googlebot. My page rank will then be lower than that of a competing US, UK or NZ company. I and other Australian companies will forever be at a commercial disadvantage because of the filter.

11

Anonymous

Tue 02/02/2010 - 04:09

Absolutely! No business impact!

Not to ANYONE on the whole planet for any reason, and DEFINITELY not poor b*stards like the dentist here...

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/internet-filter-gets-green-light-20091215-kucp.html

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