Look, a butterfly!

Some of you may have heard about the federal government’s proposal to implement mandatory internet filtering at the ISP (internet service provider) level. I wanted to post about the proposal’s champion, Stephen Conroy’s, recent TV appearances regarding the filter, however, I thought it best to provide a short historical recap of the proposal, before I delve into recent developments.

In late 2007, Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy announced that the federal government would like to implement an ISP-based filter to censor “unwanted content”, to protect children (ABC news). He stated that “anyone wanting uncensored access to the internet will have to opt out of the service” (emphasis mine). I have heard that this was one of the platforms that the Labor party was campaigning on before the 2007 election, but I haven’t been able to find any evidence of this (if you know something, please let me know). In mid 2008, this scheme was updated to include a secondary mandatory filter to stop “adults from downloading content that is illegal to possess in Australia, like child pornography or materials related to terrorism” (NY Times). A month later, the ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) released a report entitled “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filters” (pdf). The report showed that “all of the products tested degraded Internet performance, with two of them reducing speed by more than 75 per cent. One filter reduced network speed by only 2 per cent, but it was one of the least accurate at identifying inappropriate and illegal websites. It also mistakenly blocked many innocent sites” (ABC news).

The second half of the year seemed to be filled with massive opposition to the filter. Many comprehensive objections were being voiced (I will discuss these in a future post, but these include technical issues, freedom of speech concerns and the government’s right to tell adults what content is “unwanted” for them). However, it was still not clear what it was that the government was actually proposing to do. Senator Conroy seemed to concentrate on defending the technology behind the filter rather than addressing some of the other equally concerning issues (youtube).

On December 8, the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy set up the “first online consultation trial” in the form of a blog. The first post, entitled “Minister Tanner’s Welcome“, which did not even mention the filter, was inundated with hundreds of comments, of which I approximate 99% were to do with the filter and and >95% were in opposition to or expressed concern about it. I remember watching the comments coming in in real time, seeing the numbers grow after each refresh and then on at least two occasions, noticing the number of comments suddenly drop by 20 or 30 with no trace of the standard etiquette that usually accompanies comment removal. Were our comments being filtered? This was later followed by an on-topic blog post by Senator Conroy and many more comments. It was becoming very clear that most people (at least those that used the internet) were very strongly opposed to the proposal.

On December 12, 2008 we had a national day of protest (IT news). I attended the protest in Brisbane, but was mostly disappointed with the turn-out. From what I had seen on the internet, there was massive opposition to the scheme (from memory, the facebook event for the Brisbane protest had around a thousand confirmed attendees), yet sadly, this didn’t translate to their physical presence (possibly 200-300 people showed up). I got a feeling that there had been a bit of a climax in activity leading up to the protests (many people vented on the government blog), and I suspect that by the time the protests came, most people were secretly convinced that now that everyone knew (and was angry) about it, there is no way that the government could go ahead with its proposal.

There was talk of some more trials being done before the end of the year, but it was announced that they would be pushed back a few weeks (ABC news), which turned into months. After that, things went quiet…until a couple of weeks ago, when the top-secret ACMA blacklist (the backbone of the filter trial) was leaked and published on wikileaks. This caused iiNet, Australia’s third largest ISP, to join Telstra (Australia’s largest ISP) in pulling out of the trials. At present, the following ISPs are still planning to participate: Primus Telecommunications, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1 (Australian IT). Conroy has since claimed that this was not the real blacklist (ABC news) and has broken his relative silence about the scheme by appearing on the ABC’s program Q&A last week and on SBS’s Insight earlier tonight. I will blog about these two appearances in a later post, however, you can view the full Q&A episode on the ABC website. Tonight’s Insight episode should be available in the SBS archives soon. You could also try youtube.

For more information on the filter, check out the Electronic Frontiers Australia nocleanfeed website.