Page 4331 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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MS LE COUTEUR: First off, I believe our planning code should include a requirement that all new housing estates provide the capability for cabled high speed broadband. I think I have already covered the reasons for that.
The second item I want to deal with is internet filtering. Internet filtering is very relevant to the NBN, because the NBN’s purpose is to provide fast, high quality internet connections. But the internet filter’s purpose is to provide slower, less high quality internet connections. So the two are very much related.
Many ISPs and organisations are worried that the proposed internet filter has the potential to cause bottlenecks and webpage blackouts, making the high speed NBN less viable. There is quite an unusual diversity of groups who oppose the filter. It is not just the Greens. The list of groups includes Electronic Frontiers Australia, Google, Child Wise, us of course, and, I believe from their public statements, the federal coalition.
We all oppose the introduction of a mandatory internet filter as part of the commonwealth’s broadband and communications strategy. Not only will it slow down the internet; it simply does not provide any substantive protection to children or substantive reduction in the accessibility of objectionable material. It does provide the commonwealth government, whoever that may be in the future, with the architecture to implement a much broader censorship plan. Thus, my amendment calls upon the abandonment of the unworkable mandatory internet filtering policy.
Internet filtering has two levels: firstly, the compulsory filtering for all internet coming into Australia of prohibited content; and, secondly, there would be an optional level of filtering for those houses which chose to participate in it. The system proposed involves a blacklist plus dynamic filtering. The dynamic filtering is essentially a roadblock or a checkpoint which will analyse all traffic flowing past it for prohibited content, just like a physical roadblock on the road. This will slow down Australian access to the web and cause traffic jams.
It will also have quite a lot of false positives and block things which people should quite reasonably want to be able to see. There will be a blacklist maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, ACMA, which will deny access to prohibited content. It is speculated that this could have 10,000 sites on it. But there are a lot of questions still about this. How will the content be decided? Senator Conroy has described them as “inappropriate” and “unwanted” but according to what criteria? By whom? Will its decisions be transparent? Will they be able to be challenged and debated? Will they be publicly available? Will it prohibit access to legal material or only illegal material?
None of the country’s biggest ISPs like the plan and none of them want to cooperate with the government on it. I doubt that very many users of the internet see what is being proposed—even though it is not exactly clear just what that is—as in any way necessary. But the people who use the internet I do not think are the major people that the censoring is meant to appeal to.
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