According to a news report on SMH this afternoon, iiNet has heard nothing from the Government about their application (lodged December 6) to participate in the next trial of ISP filtering systems. That trial is still yet to start, despite a Christmas wish from Senator Conroy it would begin as early as December 24.
Mark White, COO of iiNet, said his ISP was told after applying that the Government would come back with more details by the middle of January, but all they had heard was “deafening silence”:
‘I can’t for a moment speculate what’s going on but it certainly doesn’t seem to be running as a project on time and they’re certainly not communicating with the people that they need to – that is, the ISPs that have offered to test this thing.’
Senator Scott Ludlam believes ‘delays in starting the trials indicated the Government may have hit the wall of technical impossibility that the industry had been warning it about for 12 months.’ He said:
‘Considering the intention was to launch a live trial before Christmas, we’ve got a six week delay and no commitment to testing on actual people. This isn’t a great advertisement for the workability of any large scale scheme.’
Vendors
In same report, Peter Coroneos from the Internet Industry Association reveals that ‘Some vendors have been approaching ISPs and saying we’re happy to support your participation in the trial and then on that basis they put in an application.’
ISPs aren’t the only ones being approached. I’ve been hit up by several filtering vendors over the last year trying to sell me on the idea that their product won’t impinge upon free speech. Other vendors continue to post about their products on this blog, some anonymously.
ACMA Blacklist
Lastly, the stories writer, Asher Moses, draws much needed attention to the type of content listed on the current ACMA blacklist which is too often said to contain only illegal material by those supporting the plan. Moses writes:
And despite Senator Conroy claiming that most of the content on the ACMA blacklist was child pornography, the Government revealed that only 674 sites out of the 1370 sites currently listed related to depictions of a child under 18.
506 sites would be classified R18+ and X18+, which is legal to view in Australia but would be blocked for everyone under Labor’s mandatory censorship scheme.
Read the complete article at SMH or see these articles on EFA and Libertus for more information on the existing blacklist.
4 comments
Stuart Anderson says:
Jan 31, 2009
“I’ve been hit up by several filtering vendors over the last year trying to sell me on the idea that their product won’t impinge upon free speech.”
Isn’t that like saying “our guns won’t kill people”?
Much like a gun, a censoring system has a single purpose, it cannot do anything else. To suggest otherwise is an outright lie, and a boorish one at that.
Dan says:
Jan 31, 2009
iiNet oppose the filter, of course the government are not going to let a trial be run.
Only an idiot would allow an enemy to poke even more holes in their shoddy product.
Bob Bain says:
Jan 31, 2009
For those who may not have seen this article here’s a list of ISPs who have indicated they will or will not get involved in the filtering trial and their stated philosophical reasons..
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/communications/soa/Telstra-out-of-Conroy-s-filtering-trial/0,130061791,339293711,00.htm
“iiNet’s position, described on the site, was that internet filtering did not work, would impact on networks’ performance and that the scope of “unwanted” content would grow over time.”
Westnet “We’re just going to lean on the results of iiNet,” a spokesperson for the company said.
People Telecom : “We are not convinced that content filtering makes practical sense and we are concerned at the potential risk to service quality,” the company posted in a forum.
iPrimus : “It’s easy for us to do it,” iPrimus CEO Ravi Bhatia said.
Netspace : “The filtering EOI as we received it was severely lacking in detail and the time frames were too unrealistic for us to participate,” Netscape regulatory and carrier affairs manager Matthew Phillips said.
Adam Internet : CEO Scott Hicks said that Adam Internet would send a discussion paper to the government on what it thinks should happen — that is that the filtering not go ahead in its current form.
Darkness at Noon » Mark Newton, Jim Wallace debating ISP level filtering says:
Feb 2, 2009
[...] (from Vimeo via Somebody Think of the Children. [...]