Australia to join China, Egypt and Iran in filtering Internet access
BY JEREMY BROWN
Rudd Government plans to introduce compulsory content control for Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) this year has been met with shock and disbelief by technical experts, FOI lawyers and civil libertarians.
In November last year Senator Conroy released an Expression of Interest seeking participation of ISPs and mobile telephone providers in a live pilot of the forthcoming mandatory system, whose stated aim is preventing the spread of child pornography.
According to the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s (ACMA) last report, about half the sites on the blacklist fall under the heading ‘RC (refused classification) – Child – Depiction’.
The rest are X-rated and other legal material, as well as nudity, violence, crime and sexual fantasy. Until now ISPs have been able to ignore the ACMA blacklist of web pages.
The reaction from ISPs and IT professionals has been negative. Critics of the scheme say the filters will slow internet delivery speeds, block access to legitimate sites and will not be effective because the same material can be found elsewhere.
Telstra refused to take part in the pilot. ‘Telstra is not in a position to participate in the Government’s Internet filtering trial, primarily due to customer management issues,’ a spokesperson said.
iiNet manager Michael Malone said he enrolled to prove ‘how stupid it is’.
The iiNet’s website states: ‘The government has said ‘The pilot will specifically test filtering against the ACMA black list of prohibited internet content, which is mostly child pornography, as well as filtering of other unwanted content’. iiNet believes ‘unwanted content’ can be interpreted to mean anything the government of the day wants. This is absolutely unacceptable. We have no objection to appropriate legal process, but will not accept that an anonymous government official will make a call on the basis of his or her own judgment.’
Colin Seeger of Electronic Frontiers Australia, an online freedoms and rights advocacy group, said Senator Conroy had consistently referred to stamping out child pornography when defending this scheme.
‘The plan is being represented as a ‘cyber-safety’ measure for young people, protecting them from pornography, violence and terrorism. Unfortunately we don’t know the full extent of it because the contents of the ACMA blacklist are not available under the FOI Act,’ he said.
‘It seems safe to assume that the Government could expand its blacklist and use the filters to block material they object to, such as negative political speech.’
