Senator Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, appears to be out of touch with the Internet industry. The only ISP to accept the ‘live-trial’ of a censorship system was iiNet, who claimed they’re participating to point out how errorant the governments proposal is. Not even Telstra accepted.

The ‘live-trial’ was quite interesting indeed. The government proposes we filter child pornography, and other ‘illegal content’ not yet defined. They’re proposing a filter with an absolute maximum of 10,000 entries. I fail to see how this will be useful in blocking any content. Additionally, the ‘live-trial’ will not be conducted on real-world ISP networks – infact, a much smaller network which completely nulls out any scalability testing. South Cross Cables claims to hold 480Gbps to the USA and new International carriers are soon to enter the market – any realistic ‘live-trial’ would be of a larger list, for significantly larger quantities of bandwidth.

The mention of Southern Cross Cables brings up another issue… if content within Australia can be successfully ‘taken down’ by law enforcement, why is the proposed censorship at the ISP level? Clearly the issue is with International bandwidth which places any censorship with International carriers like Southern Cross Cables, and not ISPs which are often small businesses who will likely find it difficult to finance any censorship systems.

The Unitied Kingdom is the Governments number 1 case example of Internet Censorship that works… its now hitting the headlines that the UK is filtering certain Wikipedia pages. I’m really surprised they don’t mention China as another location where Internet Censorship has worked.

I’m not the only one who holds the views that censorship isn’t the answer, and know a number of persons in the Internet industry who carry similar views to my own.

Instead of censorship – IP addressing should be ‘static’ by law. This will mean unique users can easily be identified on the Internet, and provided they don’t divulge the information, their address and name will remain private – obtainable only by a court order. Static addressing for all will also mean voluntary blocklists like anti-spam DNSBLs will be more effective, it should be much harder for a spammer to obtain a new address (relocation of ISP perhaps?). Telstra happens to be the largest offender of dynamic addressing in Australia. But don’t be fooled, it isn’t a national problem – its a global problem.

Greater regulation also needs to be created to deal with questionable online activities, ISPs divluging information to courts, and what justifies as undeniable evidence in the computer world.

Clearly Internet censorship is nothing to worry about. It may pass into law, but it’ll come and go. Just a few more billion dollars wasted by Krudd

Yesterday, there were protests across the country against the governments proposal to censor the Internet. As you can see from the above photo, it was a huge success in Sydney

UPDATE: APC Mag did a nice writeup on how much these protests sucked. Except they thought the opposite. Hundreds? What, across the whole country? These are the only people with Internet?