Telstra will not take part in the Government’s live ISP filtering pilot. According to Australian IT, Telstra says it is not in a position to participate in the Government’s internet filtering trial, primarily due to customer management issues. A spokesperson for Telstra said:
Telstra is separately evaluating technology that allows the blocking of defined blacklists and we will continue to work constructively with all stakeholders, including the Government, to help provide a safe internet environment for children.
EscapeNet, who are said to be against mandatory ISP filtering, also won’t be participating in the trial according to this post on Whirlpool.
On a side note, apart from Senator Conroy, where does Australian IT get their information that the ACMA blacklist of 1300 URLs ‘mainly contains web pages of child sexual abuse web sites’.
The trial will test against ACMA’s blacklist that currently contains 1300 URLs and may expand to approximately 10,000 links.
The list mainly contains web pages of child sexual abuse web sites.
EFA has an article on what the list also contains here, as does Irene Graham here. EFA writes:
Although we don’t know what’s on it, the ACMA does publish some statistics on what is blocked and why. In the ACMA’s last report, 781 overseas sites were added to the list. Of these, 3 were pedophilia related, and 410 fell under the heading “RC – Child – Depiction.” The rest, 368 sites, were mostly X-rated (251) and other legal material, including some prohibited for nudity, violence, crime or even “sexual fantasy”. Previous years showed similar statistics. We also know there are around 1300 URLs total on the blacklist at the moment.
