Fatal flaws in government internet censorship plan

mike · #1 (**permalink**) 01-03-2009, 06:31 AM

There is a good article on SMH on problems with the governments plan to censor the internet.

I used to follow politics in Australia, but lost interest after moving overseas. Since this internet issue has some impact on my business and future business in Australia, I am taking more of an interest than other issues and new laws in Australia.

I would say the general population who have little interest in the internet don't care too much about this, but for a small but I believe influential part of the community are strongly against this. The government has smartly positioned this policy/law saying it will "protecting children". Ordinary Australians obviously are not going to argue with this. Opponents to the proposed censorship are being labeled as pornographers.

The other problem I have with it, is people like Senator Conroy are the driving force behind the initiative and he clearly does not have the technical knowledge of the policy he is trying to implement. It makes me wonder how many other areas is the government creating laws policies which they do not have knowledge and experience in?

Telstra is not even testing the government's policy. iiNet are conducting a trial to prove to the government, the initiative will fail.

Even if you support the government on this, I think it will be an interesting issue to follow.

- A small, but very vocal (at least on the internet) is vehemently opposed to this.

- Australia's largest ISP is not even bothering running a trial (?)

- Senator Conroy who is leading the changes has no idea about the internet and technical details.

- Australia will join countries like China, Burma and Iran who actively censor the internet.

- Taxpayers money is being wasted with the trial, while nothing is being done to increase crime fighting on the internet

- We hear nothing from Rudd on this.

- The internet is said to have had a great impact on how Obama was elected, perhaps the internet will be used against Rudd to make sure he loses the next election.

Quote:

Professor Landfeldt, one of Australia's leading telecommunications experts, says some of the fundamental flaws of the scheme raised in his report include:
� All filtering systems will be easily circumvented using readily available software.
� Censors maintaining the blacklist will never be able to keep up with the amount of new content published on the web every second.
� Filters using real-time analysis of sites to determine whether content is inappropriate are not effective, capture wanted content, are easy to bypass and slow network speeds exponentially as accuracy increases.
� Entire user-generated content sites such as YouTube and Wikipedia could be blocked over a single video or article.
� Filters would be costly and difficult to implement for ISPs and put many smaller ISPs out of business.
� While the communciations authority's blacklist would be withheld from internet users, all 700 ISPs would have access to it, so it could easily be leaked.
� The filters would not censor content on peer-to-peer file sharing networks such as LimeWire, chat rooms, email and instant messaging;
� ISPs and the Government could be legally liable for the scheme's failures, particularly as content providers have no right to appeal against being blocked unnecessarily.

bizonapage · #2 (**permalink**) 01-14-2009, 05:47 PM

Is it possible the law will have merit?

The flaws you mention do seem like short comings but I hope over time they would be teased out.

Surely there may be some benefit of the government and big corporations using their influence and money to look after us and our children too.

I notice at the tail of your posting there is the message "All spam and self promotion posts will be deleted and accounts banned. Valued members can promote their business in their signature only." This kind of censorship goes on all the time and helps the community have good content and protects the readers and posters.

mike · #3 (**permalink**) 01-15-2009, 06:13 AM

Well spam is illegal in most parts of the world and occasionally there are some convictions. Banning people because of spam is not a form of censorship.