Across the Spectrum
Filtering at Odds with Broadband Revolution.
4/12/2008
The Labor Government went to the last election with a plan for "Cyber Safety" - protecting children online. The major component of this scheme involves a "clean feed" Internet, whereby Internet service providers would be obliged to filter out material deemed "inappropriate" for children by the Government. It now appears that the optional clean feed will be joined by a second blacklist, for illegal material, that will be mandatory for all Australians.
Although on the surface filtering out adult or illegal material might seem like a good idea, there are many reasons why this is bad policy. When their Government announces a plan of pervasive technological censorship, Australians are right to demand some explanations to put their minds at ease, and in this case, the explanations fall very short.
Technologically, Internet filtering is a real nightmare. Regardless of the scheme adopted, a slowdown in Internet speeds is inevitable, and the more aggressive the filtering, the slower the network access becomes. The Government's own trials of dynamic filters showed slowdowns on an average of 30% and as high as 76%. No blacklist can ever encompass a fraction of material that would be inappropriate, and dynamic filters inevitably result in massive over-blocking of legitimate content on subjects such as sexual health and drugs. No matter how much taxpayer money is spent, any eventual filter could be circumvented by a determined user. In fact, today the majority of internet traffic is in the form of peer-to-peer applications which could not be filtered in this way. Although very limited filtering has occurred in other democracies, the scope of the Government's plan is much broader and is only comparable to that attempted by repressive regimes around the world.
Before the scheme is in place, pressure is already mounting in Parliament to expand the scope of the mandatory filter to encompass all adult material and other categories such as gambling or anorexia-related sites. It's hard to see how the Government could resist this pressure when bargaining in the senate to get important legislation passed.
At a time when we all acknowledge the importance of Australia's competitiveness in the digital economy, spending tens of millions of dollars to implement a program that would slow network speeds and raise the costs of access seems strange at best. But would the scheme protect children? All signs point to no. Even if the bureaucrats could somehow devise filtering criteria acceptable to all parents, the filters would let too much material through, and would be easy to circumvent. Some parents will be lulled into a false sense of security, thinking the filter would protect their kids from cyber-bullying, theft of personal information, or chat-room creeps, when in fact it would only block access to a broad swathe of web sites.
In short, Government censorship can never be an acceptable substitute for parental discretion.Go to GetUP and sign the partition
Posted on the campaign blog , November 4th, 2008 Colin Jacobs is a spokesman for Electronic Frontiers Australia
