[LINK] ISP filtering a pipe dream: Telstra

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

ISP filtering a pipe dream: Telstra
Fran Foo
December 05, 2008
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24755150-15306,00.html

TELSTRA chief operating officer Greg Winn says the federal Government's 
attempt to censor the internet is akin to trying to "boil the ocean".

"My view on that is that's like trying to boil the ocean ... to think 
that you're going to be able to centrally filter everything, I think 
that's a pipe dream," Mr Winn told reporters and analysts yesterday.

Child protection agencies have welcomed the Government's move to filter 
the internet but civil libetarians, ISPs and the technical community 
have rallied against it for various reasons.

The Government plans to have two streams of filtered content. The 
mandatory portion will adhere to a blacklist of thousands of illegal web 
pages managed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority 
(ACMA) and an optional clean feed of URLs that would automatically 
censor content, mostly adult material.

Mr Winn agreed with broad comments from the ISP community that internet 
filtering would make surfing the web a slower process. "The one thing I 
do know is that once you start filtering, then you're going to add 
latency no matter what," he said.

The Government has invited ISPs and mobile phone providers to 
participate in a live internet filtering trial, releasing details of its 
long-awaited call for expressions of interest (EOI) on November 10.

ACMA has completed closed lab trials of ISP content filtering conducted 
by Enex TestLab. The live pilot, however, is the first step towards 
evaluating whether content filtering at a network provider level is 
feasible in Australia.

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.

The deadline for the EOI is next Monday and the Government would like 
the trial to kick-off by December 24.

The nation's largest telecommunications provider, Telstra, still hasn't 
decided if it plans to play ball.

Meanwhile, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy came under fire this 
week for failing to reveal details of the trial.

During question time on Wednesday Senator Conroy was asked how many 
participants would ISPs have to enlist for the live trials to be credible.

South Australian Liberal MP Cory Bernardi also asked if the results of 
the trials would be independently verified.

Senator Conroy couldn't provide answers to both questions within the 
two-minute timeframe provided.

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Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd at iimetro.com.au