Copyright Law

Aussie ISPs: ?Net Filtering Doesn?t Slow Connection Speeds?

By soulxtc

Majority of participants in govt’s blacklist trial report that customers experienced minimal speed disruptions.

Australia’s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy Stephen Conroy is certainly happy these days with news that his plans for a “voluntary mandatory” Net filtering plan has had a minimal effect on the connection speeds of a majority of the participants connections speeds.

In case you?ve forgotten, Minister Conroy is the same one behind the country?s much criticized efforts for ?mandatory voluntary? filtering of ??offensive and illegal material,? pornography, P2P, gambling websites, and even the recently disclosed online gaming sites, per his ill-conceived plan to ?protect the children.?

?From a technical perspective we?re more than confident that if the government decided to roll out a mandatory Internet filter based on or around an Australian Communications and Media Authority [ACMA] blacklist or subset thereof, then it can be done without any impact whatsoever to the speed of the Internet,? said Webshield managing director, Anthony Pillion.

A total of 9 ISPs participated in the Filtering Live Pilot, 5 of which, iPrimus, Netforce, Webshield, Nelson Bay Online and OMNIconnect, reported “reported minimal speed disruptions or technology problems.” The remaining 4, Tech2U, Highway1, Unwired, and Optus either had no comment or refused requests for one.

?The users have not experienced any problems, they haven?t experienced any service degradation so it?s been a pretty good experience,? said iPrimus Australia CEO, Ravi Bhatia.

One ISP did report that some customers complained that legal sites had been blocked, an obvious admission that the site blacklist needs a lot of careful oversight and moderation.

?Some of the customers complained because the block list really hadn?t been moderated well enough,? OMNIconnect chief technician, Graeme Lee, said. ?One in particular was a site called Redtube.com. The whole site had been blocked and it was just a standard pornography site,? Hutton said.

?Relating to that particular site we did have complaints that people couldn?t get through to it. They opted out of the trial straight away. It was a very embarrassing experience.?

However, it’s safe to argue that the trial is a pretty poor representation of what it’ll be like when they begin filtering the activities of millions of users. ISP Nelson Bay Online for example, had only 15 participants.

iiNet, Australia’s largest ISP, has been conspicuously absent from the whole affair noting last November “how stupid” the plan is. It initially agreed to participate to give the govt some “hard numbers” and prove the plan unworkable, but later quit after concluding that it was no longer about child pornography, but a ?much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as “unwanted material? without an explanation of what that includes.?

Stay tuned.

jared@zeropaid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on July 29, 2009 (boomark / email).