ALP In Astounding ISP Acrobatics
ALP In Astounding ISP Acrobatics
March 22, 2006: In a backflip of epic proportions, Opposition leader Kim Beazley has announced that Labor will force Internet service providers to block pornographic and violent material from all internet connections if elected.
This is not the first time an ISP-level filtering plan has been debated in Parliament. It has been brought to debate several times by other parties such as Family First leading up to the last election.
In 2003 it was mocked and dismissed as being unworkable. Apart from being expensive and impacting heavily on internet speeds, the then Labor Shadow Spokesperson for IT, Senator Kate Lundy said “this ridiculous proposition is made even more absurd when the weaknesses of filtering technology at this level effectively ensure that it would not work anyway.”
Mr Beazley’s announcement that Labor is now backing this plan as part of its upcoming election strategy is a massive about-face.
The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan, says that Labor’s plan will do nothing but slow down the internet for every Australian with negligible effectiveness and at great cost.
A previous Government review into the filtering technology that is the basis of Labor's plan found that it would involve implementation costs of around $45 million and ongoing costs of more than $33 million per annum for ISPs.
According to this review, this kind of server-based filtering has not only been found to be expensive, but also to have a major adverse impact on network performance.
A trial conducted by researchers from RMIT found that: “All server-level filters tested had a major impact on network performance ranging from an 18% degradation for the best performing filter to 78% on the worst performing.”
“PC-based filtering remains the most effective way of protecting children from offensive Internet content, as well as other threats that are not addressed by Labor’s ISP-filtering proposals.” says Senator Coonan. “PC-based filters are more effective at blocking all manner of offensive content, provide greater control to parents of the content their children are exposed to and do not affect the performance of the Internet for all users.”
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