It is with huge disappointment that I see Conroy still pushing ahead with his brainless attempt to censor the Internet. The policy has morphed slightly, it’s now only blocking “RC” content.

Conroy claims that this is to “bring the Internet in line with other media, like publications, radio, TV and Movies”. However, anyone who knows where the word “Internet” comes from will (hopefully) immediately see the problem: The word “Internet” comes from shortening “Interconnected Network”. The Internet isn’t a media for publication or broadcast. It’s a communications medium like the telephone or postal systems. We don’t “filter” them, so how, exactly, is the “filter” going to bring the Internet in line with similar mediums?

The results of the government’s 12-month-late live pilot were unsurprising, for the most part. After all, the government left it up to Enex to determine what were acceptable success criteria.

As a result, we end up with gems like the claim that a 10% speed reduction is “negligible”. Let me explain why this is just wrong. I have an ADSL2+ Internet connection. Being around 2km from the exchange, I get around 13Mbps. A 10% reduction in speed equates to around 1300kbps, or around 160kB/s. While it is true that this is not much, it does not meet the definition of “negligible”. According to wikipedia: “In engineering, mathematics, physics and similar disciplines, the term negligible refers to the quantities so small that they can be ignored (neglected) when studying the larger effect.”

The result of the test? A success, of course. It was a foregone conclusion, due to their being no success criteria specified. Not to mention that it failed to test the really important things. For example: whether the filter will still be effective in 10 years, when we have 100Mbps internet (the filters weren’t tested above 8Mbps) and are using IPv6 (none of the filters can handle IPv6 traffic, but Enex didn’t even test it), or even if the filterboxes are susceptible to DoS attacks.

Now to explain again why we still shouldn’t go ahead with this:

1. The Internet is not a broadcast media like TV or radio, nor a publication like a magazine or newspaper. Trying to classify it as if it is is just stupid.
2. The majority of RC content is not illegal to possess or view anyway. It’s only illegal to display (in public) or distribute (within Australia).
3. An ISP filter cannot hope to block even a tiny fraction of the RC material on the web. The blacklist will be compiled by a complaints system. Complaints have been shown to take months to process. The current ACMA blacklist currently contains considerably less than 1000 RC URLs (1000 is actually very generous, since the ACMA blacklist contains stuff all the way down to MA15+). There are well over 1 Trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique pages indexed by google. If there is only 1000 out of 1,000,000,000,000 URLs on the Internet that are actually RC (0.0000001%), then the problem is so small that there is no need to spend millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars (both taxes and increased ISP fees to cover the cost of implementation) on such a small problem. If there really is so much RC stuff on the web, then such a tiny blacklist, that takes months to add new sites is not going to have any appreciable effect upon people “accidentally stumbling” across it.
4. It will not work. Anyone suitably determined is not going to be stopped by a blacklist-based ISP filter anyway. As I have pointed out on this very blog, it is incredibly simple to bypass the majority of filters. The live pilot results confirmed this, showing that none of the products tested were able to block even the majority of circumvention techniques. The Internet is not designed to be censored. There are many, many ways to bypass censorship, and the only way to make it effective is to do what China is doing (cutting itself off from the rest of the Internet) at which point it stops being the Internet.

If Conroy wants to continue with this mad scheme then he should not be surprised when it blows up in his face.