In the time I have written about the federal government's controversial plan to introduce mandatory ISP-level filtering, passionate criticism has been easy to come by from a range of technical, legal and privacy experts. But there are also child welfare groups who say filtering will help reduce demand for material that exploits children, so at least let's give the trial a fair go - which is tough to argue with.
Until the findings of the government's filtering pilot are made public, the true impact of potential degradation of access speeds, collateral or under-blocking, and ease of circumvention won't be known. Some argue the pilot won't represent real world conditions, while others claim some of the ISPs involved have a vested interest in seeing the technology succeed.
But with none of the country's largest ISPs on board, for the moment at least, I think the pilot looks a little shaky. What concerns me is the lack of transparency and clarity from the government on who, what and how filtering will be implemented. The lack of public oversight, as exists in film, television, game and literature classification, is of further concern.
But not much consideration has been paid to the potential effects of the proposal on the business community. We have our individual opinions, but what does it all mean for businesses?
What does Senator Conroy's contentious proposal mean to you and your business?
What does it mean for channel partners already selling filtering software?
How concerned are you, as someone whose business depends on the Internet, over potential impacts on Internet performance?
And do the technical concerns for collateral or under-blocking concern you?
--Andrew Hendry
even if they get the technical aspect right for a couple of months, with the pace of development in IT - and especially the hacking community - it will be outdated before too long. They should be looking at addressing the demand side of the child porn problem and not just trying to stultify supply
We sell filtering software and if the government cuts us out of this business we will have to investigate potential legal recourse
Mr Anonymous' business selling filtering software will probably not be affected.
The filter that the government proposes will (fairly deliberately) fail to block 99.99% of what *might* be classified RC because the overhead in classifying it (or refusing to classify it) will be too high.
All it will do is slow everyone's access.
As soon as people realise what it will block though (stuff you can legally view on television) almost everyone will want to find a way to get around it. And there will be so many ways (all legal).
In contrast, a PC based filtering solution (like Mr. Anonymous') can be tuned to suit the children that it is installed to protect, and turned off after they go to bed.
This is censorship pure and simple.
It starts here and grows to include anybody who does not agree with the politically correct line.
Stop it before it becomes the norm.
"Our freedom depends on the freedom of the press, this cannot be limited without being lost". People died to give us this freedom and we are giving it away!!
Who ever said Optus and it's owners are a democracy??!
Their decision certainly had an immediate on THIS customer! I had already been disturbed by their announcement of a 12% price increase in April, but not enough to go to the trouble of changing providers. However, on reading the news yesterday that they would be participating in the filtering trial, I was jolted into immediate action. I have now switched to aaNet and am glad I did. Not only am I giving the finger to Optus by doing so, I am also reducing my phone and broadband costs by a third and raising my download speeds by a factor of three. Thank you, Optus!