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.