I’ve seen some renewed interest in the Australian Government’s terrible idea to try and filter the internet, and there’s even a protest planned for people to black out their websites and profile images soon like what was done in New Zealand to protest against the ‘guilt upon accusation’ plan to block people’s internet if somebody just accused them of copyright infringement three times. The No Clean Feed group have some pretty good reasons as to why an attempt to filter the internet would have absolutely no beneficial effects and be a general disaster. Here’s my take:
There are too many protocols which can’t be filtered
The government plans to filter exactly one (1) protocol on the internet, which is HTTP. Think about that for a second – it’s essentially like banning particular subjects from bookstores, and expecting that now the public can’t access them, which is utter rubbish. In this situation, people could still mail the information to each other. They could share the books around. They could put the information up on noticeboards and other public places. The internet is exactly the same. The vast majority of the content that the program aims to filter out is not using the protocol they are going to filter. There’s FTP, bittorrent, email services, and many other peer to peer protocols that not only won’t be filtered, but really can’t. This first point essentially renders the whole scheme useless, but wait, there’s more!
There’s too much content to filter
Just on the HTTP protocol, which the government is going to attempt to filter, there are literally billions of pages of information. How can anybody really expect that they could even attempt to find all the illegal or adult content on it? There is just too much information to filter, and even if it was possible to find every illegal site on it, hundreds of new sites will inevitably pop up within weeks to replace those blocked ones. This is just the way the internet is – it’s not provided from just a few sources like most other forms of media. Anyone can create content on it, good or bad, and new content appears so quickly that any effort to filter it is quickly rendered futile. It’s not like trying to find a needle in a haystack – it’s like trying to find one in a field of millions of haystacks that’s rapidly expanding!
It’s too easy to bypass
There’s one other massive problem that renders the internet filtering plan completely ineffective, and that is encryption. It’s fairly simple to open up an encrypted connection to a network in another country, which gives anybody the ability to completely bypass the whole filtering system – because they can’t see the information that is passing through it. Now, in an environment like a school, the ports that are required to do this can be simply blocked, but in the real world any action like that would cripple many Australian businesses by removing the channels they use to do business with other countries, and cost billions to the economy.
But at least these virtual private networks are too complex for a child to set up, right? Surely we are still protecting them with the scheme? Turns out that the answer is a resounding no, given that there are thousands of (completely legal) websites that make bypassing the filtering even easier. They use secure socket layer (SSL) encryption, which is used to secure bank websites and credit card payments, to anonymously and securely view websites without having them filtered at all. It’s as simple as going to a website and typing a web address in the box. Seriously, this is like locking the front door but leaving all the windows open – there’s simply no way the internet filtering can be effective. Again, they could try to block these sites, but given that they’re legal and have a vast range of legitimate uses, this wouldn’t be possible at all.
There will be many sites incorrectly blocked
A report summing up the results of a trial undertaken by some ISPs showed that the internet filtering technology would incorrectly block 10,000 completely legal web sites out of every million sites blocked. Really, that error rate is unacceptable. Many of these incorrectly blocked sites may be reputable companies, for whom the internet is their only point of business. Is it fair that we eliminate all their Australian customers in the sake of a filtering scheme that is ineffective? And how will these people apply to get their sites unblocked? Given that the people creating the blocklist are going to be trying to search through billions of sites
It will slow down the internet
Let’s face it – here in Australia, our internet is already slow enough. Given that all the internet companies in the country have to use a telecommunications network (mis)managed by a single monopoly, we don’t have the luxury of fast, cheap internet that many other countries like Japan, Sweden and even South Korea have. So why is the government not only chasing after a plan that can’t possibly work, but one that also reduces the speed of our internet by up to 80 percent? This is exactly the kind of speed reduction that the report linked in the above predicts this filtering will cause.
Where’s the accountability?
Having a small, government controlled group deciding what information people should and shouldn’t be able to see is worrying, to say the least. Sure, the line right now is that they’re only going to block illegal material, but how can we know this is the case as time goes on? Perhaps now this is all about “protecting children and families”, but how do we know if eventually they start to increase the range of subjects being blocked? The “Great Firewall of China” has been widely criticised for essentially removing free speech on the internet by blocking thing like Google searches for ‘freedom’, information about subjects such as capitalism and blogs and websites that criticise their government. Given that our government refuses to release the blocklist proposed for this new filter in Australia, how can we be sure that they aren’t going to start doing the same thing and just pull the plug on websites they don’t agree with for us? At least with the review board that classifies films and so on, we know when something’s banned. With the new Internet filtering, the government can restrict access to any site they want, without the public having a clue. I’m sure that they’ll insist that it’s all in our best interest, and ask us to trust them, but with absolutely no accountability, I know I don’t.
It’s a waste of money
So the government wants to bring in a scheme that can’t possibly work. How much is this debacle going to cost? Turns out that they’ve budgeted more than $44 million dollars to this scheme. That kind of money could easily have gone into our hospital system, or creating jobs, or any other number of worthy causes. But instead they choose to burn it in this useless mess.
The only people who support it have no idea about the how the internet works
I think these points are pretty compelling as to why it’s a stupid idea to attempt the impossible task of filtering the internet. Really, the only people who want this filtering installed are the ones who have no idea how the internet works. Unfortunately it seems that these are exactly the same people who are making the legislation that we have to adhere to – which is about as effective as having somebody who’s never held a scalpel try to perform open heart surgery on you. It’s very important that everyone who understands the futility of the internet filtering plan to take action. The No Clean Feed group have some petitions you can sign and other suggestions for ways to speak out against this terrible plan.
In the end…
The government says that the scheme is all about protecting children from inappropriate content on the internet, but it is so horribly broken that it will be completely and utterly ineffective. All it really does is bring Australia down to China’s level (who censor search terms like ‘freedom’) in the eyes of the rest of the world. It won’t make a difference at all to internet safety, except perhaps by slowing the internet down so much that nobody can stand to use it.


