Archive for November, 2008
Google Cannot find this page
This could be the message that you receive when you search for a page deemed inappropriate if the Australian Government is successful in implementing the proposed Internet filters.
The purpose is supposedly to protect our integrity and filter out child-pornography and other illegal websites, and to help prevent access to inappropriate materbut skeptics say it will have little impact on people searching for said banned material, and will likely return fals-positives preventing us from reaching legitimate websites.
Previous legislative attempts to control inappropriate content have required internet service providers to supply NetNanny-like filters that are easily overridden by children who know how to get around such controls, and this next step seems to be a much stricter proposition with a high degree of difficulty in circumventing the controls.
The new filters will be run at border routers within ISPs, meaning that it will be very difficult to view unfiltered content unless you tunnel to an overseas proxy, which only most tech-geeks are capable of doing.
The proposed filters will have a variety of impacts on the way we use the internet, and none of them sound good:
- Internet Service Providers will need to install new software to monitor traffic, and install new hardware with enough computational power to handle the workload
- Internet speeds will likely slow, some say as much as 8%
- ISP Services will increase in price due to the new hardware and technical requirements, and this is an unnecessary increase on Australia’s already-overpriced internet services.
- The government provides the list of what it deems ”inappropriate”
- Filtering of packets may also be an invasion of our privacy.
This proposition is not foreign to some other countries either. In the USA, it has been common for the FBI to look into people’s email in order to ‘uphold national security’, whilst in the People’s Republic of China at 2006, the Ruling Communist Government demanded that Google begin censoring web searches, limiting access to Chinese Citizen’s access to material that the government found objectionable.
In Australia, there are currently local tests being run by IInet, an opposing ISP who is trying to demonstrate that it is not pheasable to run such content filtering. Their cooperation is only to prove that it can’t work.
Filtering of content is currently opt-in by IINet subscribers, but if parliament approves this new bill to filter content, then we could be viewing a restricted version of the internet as soon as next year.
SearchKing is in strong opposition to such internet filters, and enourages all our users to sign up to the online petion at GetUp!
