CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA — A New South Wales civil liberties group is calling Australia’s plan to begin censoring the internet this month “political grandstanding,” and its leader said the new law mandating filtering of violent and pornographic material will lull parents into a false sense of security.However, public condemnation may not matter if the government is unable to find effective filtering mechanisms. The system Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has proposed to handle the job already has been shot full of holes by British researchers.
According to researchers at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, CleanFeed (a network-level internet filter designed by British Telecom and touted as the leading contender for approval in Australia) easily can be circumvented by consumers.
Worse still, six other network-level filters under consideration were demonstrated by a 2006 NetAlert study to be inaccurate, expensive and difficult to set up, and could slow network traffic by as much as 78 percent.
“…[F]or larger ISPs with faster upstream connections, the use of such filters would severely reduce their performance levels,” the study noted.
As if that weren’t bad enough, even user-level filters have proven problematic. Immediately upon the news that the government might provide families with free internet filters for their home computers, teenagers began circumventing the mechanisms simply by logging onto the computers as if they were their parents.
Nevertheless, most Australian ISPs stand with the Parenting Research Centre and the Internet Industry Association (Australia’s trade association for Internet commerce, content, and connectivity) in the view that “PC-based filtering, in the hands of a responsible parent, is the only workable solution,” Telstra BigPond spokesman Craig Middleton told News.com.au.
Whether the system is workable is not the primary concern of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, however. Causing more distress for that body is that censoring internet content would put Australia in a class already occupied by China and Singapore — both of which are notorious for disallowing access to political and social content the government deems “not in the best interest of society.” China, in particular, has imprisoned dissidents who have accessed unapproved content or posted “objectionable” content to the Web.
“[This] has serious implications for freedom of expression,” the council’s vice president, David Bernie, told The Sydney Morning Herald. “When you start filtering material on political grounds — even if the material is objectionable or quite awful — we’re heading in the same direction as China and Singapore. Will there be some database of people who want to access adult pornography, which is legal in most democratic countries?”
Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy told the Herald in response, “[The] Labor [Party] makes no apologies to those who argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road. If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd Labor government is going to disagree.”
Set to take effect January 20th, changes to Australia’s broadcast regulations require anyone who serves content to people with Australian internet or mobile-phone connections to have their content government-rated according to its appropriateness for various age groups. In addition, publishers and internet service providers must block all potentially age-inappropriate material until a user proves he or she is old enough to view it. Child pornography and some violent or sexually explicit content is banned altogether under the new regulations.
According to former Communications Minister Helen Coonan, a national network-level internet-filtering system could cost $45 million to set up and $33 million a year to maintain.
