This article was originally published on 9 November 2010 on newmatilda.com.

With a $43 billion price tag, it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of debate surrounding the proposed rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN). There’s also a lot of confusion about what the proposed network can deliver, and, in any event, whether it’s worth the projected cost.

Before we begin, let’s outline exactly what the NBN is, and how it’s different from other broadband technologies—acknowledging at the same time that the information available about the NBN is still limited and is likely to change over time.

Over the next eight years the government, through its NBN Co, intends to build a fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) broadband network, and sell wholesale access to that network to other companies, who will then use that access to provide their services to businesses and consumers. The fibre to be laid can handle much higher speeds than existing cables, and even though the equipment at either end might need to be upgraded, NBN Co argues that this is still cheaper than laying new cable. The NBN will replace the current Telstra copper network, which is to be dismantled. NBN Co and Telstra have negotiated a deal to migrate Telstra’s operations over to the NBN, while giving NBN Co access to their pits and ducts for the purposes of laying this new cable.

Internet access and telephony are the most obvious examples of services that will be delivered using the NBN, but it could also be used to provide other services, such as television and on-demand video.

Under the Government’s plan, 93% of Australian premises—households and businesses—would be connected to the NBN by optical fibre cable, with most of those premises connected by a gigabit passive optical network (GPON). In a GPON, a single fibre optic cable running from an ‘exchange’ splits into up to 128 fibre optic cables, which are then connected to individual premises.

A GPON provides up to 2,500 Mbps of symmetric bandwidth (that is, 2,500 Mbps downstream and 2,500 Mbps upstream) on each fibre optic cable running from the exchange. However, that bandwidth is then shared between all of the users connected to the same splitter. In practice, most GPON networks split the bandwidth between fewer than 32 users and businesses may be eligible to get direct fibre, meaning that bandwidth would not need to be split at all.

Taking all of this into account, NBN Co is saying it will deliver 100 Mbps symmetric bandwidth to the 93% of Australian premises connected using fibre (and at least 12 Mbps asymmetric bandwidth to the remaining 7% of Australian premises using a mix of other technologies).

Other existing broadband technologies, such as DSL, cable, or wireless cannot deliver the high symmetric speed the FTTP network proposed by NBN Co promises.

Industry watchers took a lot of notice when Telstra announced last year that it would roll out DOCSIS 3.0 on its HFC cable network, enabling speeds of up to 100 Mbps—some pundits went so far as to claim that it meant that the NBN would definitely not be built as a result.

Naturally, people compared Telstra’s 100 Mbps claim to NBN Co’s 100 Mbps claim, and concluded that they were the same. But they’re not. On Telstra’s HFC cable network, the 100 Mbps is split between all the users (often hundreds) who share a single node on its network. As explained above, the NBN’s GPON also shares bandwidth in a similar way—but it shares a much larger pool of bandwidth (2,500 Mbps) between fewer users (fewer than 32, typically). Furthermore, should the NBN’s GPON not provide enough bandwidth between 32 users, it can be upgraded to 10,000 Mbps, 40,0000 Mbps, or higher in areas where this is needed.

Similar analysis is applicable to wireless broadband technologies, like Telstra’s Next G network. Earlier this year, Telstra became the first telecommunications company to provide dual carrier HSPA+ services, delivering downstream speeds of up to 42 Mbps. And further upgrades to 84 Mbps are planned beyond that.

But these wireless speeds are theoretical maximums only: they’re attainable only under perfect conditions and, even then, that bandwidth is shared between several users. And unlike the NBN, the technology is asymmetric, so upstream speeds are much slower than downstream speeds-typically less than 1 Mbps.

DSL is the most common broadband technology in use today. ADSL2+ delivers downstream speeds of up to 24 Mbps, but, while the bandwidth isn’t shared between multiple users as with the technologies mentioned above, it is significantly affected by the distance and quality of copper wire connecting the user to the exchange.

Typical downstream speeds are closer to 10–15 Mbps. And, again, ADSL2+ is asymmetric, with upstream speeds typically closer to 1 Mbps. High-speed symmetric DSL services (such as SHDSL) exist, including some services that use more than one copper pair to get higher speeds, but these services are considerably more expensive than ADSL2+ and they’re available only in limited areas.

There’s also satellite broadband, which is expensive, relatively slow, and suffers from high latency as the signal needs to travel an extra 35,786 km or so to geostationary orbit and back. It’s only suitable for remote regions, where other technology cannot be deployed cost effectively.

Hopefully from the above it is apparent that the NBN offers a significant speed advantage—in particular on the upstream side—relative to other available technologies. But the question remains whether that extra speed is worth the extra cost. What does that extra speed actually deliver?

Recently, Shadow Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, remarked that ‘for most, if not all applications, much lower speeds are perfectly [fine]. If you could deliver nationwide 12 Mbps at relatively modest cost compared to the NBN, what is the additional utility [or] value of going from 12 to 100  [Mbps]?’

That view has some support, particularly with the news that only about one in ten households recently offered connections to the NBN in Tasmania took up the offer. And of those households that did choose to connect to the NBN, only a small minority opted to pay for the maximum 100 Mbps speed. It seems that the demand for 100 Mbps connections simply isn’t there.

But all of this misses the point: the NBN isn’t about the bandwidth that today’s residential users need to use today’s consumer services. With an estimated build timeline stretching into eight years, the question isn’t what bandwidth Australians want today, but what bandwidth Australians will need to have to be globally competitive eight years from now.

There are certainly many consumer-level services that could benefit from higher bandwidth. Anything that involves streaming high-definition video on demand needs a lot of downstream bandwidth. The amount of bandwidth needed depends on the resolution and the compression quality: Blu-ray quality 1080p video, for example, has a bit rate between 15 and 40 Mbps, though lower quality video needs substantially less bandwidth.

The Web 2.0 revolution—YouTube and the like—has meant that so-called consumers no longer just consume. They want to create and share content, including video content, with family, friends, and the world. And at current upstream speeds, sharing anything but short or low-definition video is all but impossible.

But it’s really businesses that stand to gain the most from the NBN (except those whose monopolies might be eroded by it). It’s a myth that businesses already have access to ubiquitous, high-speed broadband. While some businesses, particularly those in the CBDs of our capital cities, can get high-speed, symmetric (but expensive) internet access, most business can only get consumer-grade broadband (particularly small businesses in the suburbs).

Anyone who’s ever needed to access a large PDF file from a small business branch office (particularly if they didn’t know which large PDF they were looking for) will tell you how frustrating it is. Because such offices are often connected with asymmetric broadband, like ASDL2+, the speed at which users can access files from other offices is often limited to around 1 Mbps.

The other emerging trend, particularly in business, is towards more cloud computing. It’s a buzzword but the idea is simple. If you’re running a doctor’s office, an accounting practice, a law firm, or just about any business, you’re not in the business of managing servers. Yet many such businesses have to maintain an assortment of servers in order to operate-mail servers, database servers, file servers, and so on.

In many cases, it is more efficient for an IT services company to run these services for a number of businesses in a centralised location with specialised staff, rather than each of these businesses maintaining their own servers.

However, those businesses need to have the high-speed symmetric Internet access to use such hosted services. Most local area networks-the networks that connect computers and servers within a single location, like an office—run at 100 Mbps or more. A 1 Mbps upstream connection, such as that available to many small businesses today, is no substitute.

It is clear enough that the NBN will deliver benefits to businesses and to consumers, the question remains whether it’s worth the cost.

The Government’s Implementation Study estimates that $26 billion of Commonwealth funding will be required to build the NBN. The rest of the funds needed to build the $43 billion network will come from the private debt markets and, once part of the NBN is operational, from NBN Co’s revenues.

In round figures, the $26 billion Commonwealth outlay works out to about $10 per Australian (or $30 per household) per month over the eight year construction period. It’s important, though, that NBN Co will generate revenues from the network, and that the Government presently expects to sell off NBN Co after 15 years with a 6–7% return on this $26 billion public investment.

It’s a question of policy. The NBN will provide speeds that are significantly faster than those that are deliverable with existing technologies. And that speed advantage will enable new services, both for consumers and for businesses. But I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it’s worth the cost.

Senator Stephen Conroy jumped the gun by 107 days, announcing that the Government would table legislation to mandate filtering of RC content hosted outside Australia during the autumn 2010 parliamentary sittings.

Depending on the technology, you can bypass the filter by changing your DNS servers, using an encrypted VPN service, or installing Tor (among other solutions). But some of these workarounds can take up to 60 seconds to set up. And using an encrypted tunnel, like a VPN or Tor, will slow your access while you’re using it.

Thankfully, you can also bypass the proposed mandatory filter more conveniently. Just add ?NoCleanFeed or &NoCleanFeed to the end of the blacklisted URL. If the URL doesn’t already contain a ?, add ?NoCleanFeed to the end. If it does contain a ?, add &NoCleanFeed to the end.

For example, if you try to access www.bannedsite.com/page.htm, but you’re blocked, try accessing www.bannedsite.com/page.htm?NoCleanFeed.

If you want to watch a YouTube video that was deemed too shocking for Australian citizens, like www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMiEagk2qN8, you can just try www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMiEagk2qN8&NoCleanFeed instead.

Why It Works

The proposed mandatory filter is to block individual pages containing RC content, and only those pages. It will not block all traffic to a particular IP address or to a particular website. That is, when www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMiEagk2qN8 is inevitably blacklisted as RC content, access will only be blocked to that URL, and not to any other page on www.youtube.com.

That means that you can still view Government-approved YouTube videos, like www.youtube.com/watch?v=03OJvZhU-3M.

To get that result, the filter must block access only where the host and path in the URL (the part before any ?) and the query string (the part after any ?) all match the blacklisted URL. If the filter blocked access where only the host and path matched, all YouTube videos would be blocked when any YouTube video was blacklisted because the host and path for all YouTube videos is the same (www.youtube.com/watch).

Web servers, however, normally ignore unrecognised query string parameters. For example, YouTube looks for a v parameter, which contains the ID of the video to play. You can also optionally specify a fmt parameter to specify the desired video format. And there are several others that YouTube understands. Changing these parameters will change the page that YouTube returns.

But if you pass YouTube a parameter in the query string that it doesn’t recognise, like NoCleanFeed or some other arbitrary string, it will just ignore it, and display the same content as if it were absent. But since the URL is no longer the same as the blacklisted URL, the filter won’t block it.

The same is true for most other web servers. For example, try www.google.com/search?q=test and www.google.com/search?q=test&NoCleanFeed. You should get the same page both times (though ads and other dynamic content may change).

When It Won’t Work

Most servers will ignore unrecognised query string parameters, but not all will. Where the server doesn’t ignore unrecognised parameters, you may get an error or an unexpected page. In that case, you’ll have to fall back to one of the other methods for bypassing the filter.

And, of course, if all else fails, you can still send your favourite RC content by carrier pigeon. It’s faster than Australian Internet access anyway.

On 20 June 2009, a young woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, was shot and killed during the Iranian election protests. Her death was captured on video, and spread virally on the Internet, becoming a rallying cry for the Iranian protests.

Given the notorious attempts by the Iranian government to censor the protests, both online and in the media, I thought it would be fitting to test Senator Stephen Conroy’s assertions that the Government’s proposed mandatory Internet filter was unlike the censorship that occurs in Iran and under other undemocratic regimes.

I submitted the following to ACMA:

I am an Australian resident. I believe the content at the following links is prohibited content or potential prohibited content hosted outside Australia within the meaning of the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (Cth).

[URL 1: Boing Boing post with embedded YouTube video showing the death of Neda Agha-Soltan and associated commentary.]
[URL 2: YouTube video showing the death of Neda Agha-Soltan.]
[URL 3: YouTube video showing another angle of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan.]

Each contains graphic video, apparently real, of a young girl shot in the chest and bleeding to death over the course of a couple of minutes.

The first link has no restrictions for viewing the video (but contains a textual warning). The second two links require registration and a declaration of date of birth (and also contain textual warnings).

The videos document the recent violence in Iran.

I have removed the URLs for legal reasons. If you haven’t already seen these videos, they’re easy enough to find (but be warned: they are graphic).

Today, 64 days later, I received a notice from ACMA confirming that the content was prohibited content.

As part of the ACMA’s investigation of the complaint, it applied to the Classification Board for classification of the content concerned. As a result of the Classification Board’s decision, and as the content is not subject to a restricted access system, it is prohibited content under clause 20(1)(b) of Schedule 7 to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (the Act).

The videos are certainly graphic, and I can see why there would be demand for a service that allowed people to avoid content such as this, if that is their individual choice.

However, under both the current and the proposed systems of Internet censorship in Australia, the Classification Board’s decision is binding, to varying degrees, on individuals. For instance, now, Australian-hosted sites cannot link to these videos.

Not the Classification Board or ACMA’s Fault

The Guidelines for the Classification of Films and Computer Games provide that the Classification Board classify violent content with an impact higher than ‘strong’ R 18+ and that the Classification Board refuse classification of content that contains gratuitous, exploitative, or offensive depictions of cruelty or real violence that are very detailed or that have a high impact.

The relevant video certainly does have a high impact, and I don’t see a problem with the Classification Board’s decision. It is reasonable.

Similarly, ACMA has an obligation to blacklist (ie, add to the list of websites containing prohibited content, which is distributed to makers of IIA Family Friendly Filters) any site hosting prohibited content overseas. ACMA has no discretion not to blacklist content that meets the statutory definition of prohibited content.

You can, however, blame the people responsible for the law: the members of parliament responsible for passing this law originally, and the members of parliament today responsible for not repealing it.

Not Refused Classification

Although the position was ambiguous initially (and is arguably still uncertain), Senator Stephen Conroy has now stated that the Government wants to constrain mandatory Internet filtering to content that is refused classification. (Though, refused classification content is much broader than his statements suggest.)

The notice that I received from ACMA indicates that the content was classified R 18+. It made reference to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992 (Cth) sch 7 cl 20(1)(b), which relates to R 18+ content that is not subject to a restricted access system.

Although it’s implied, it’s not absolutely clear that the classification for each of the three submitted URLs was the same.

Because this content was classified R 18+ and not refused classification, this content would not be subject to mandatory filtering under a regime that mandated filtering only of content that has been refused classification.

Banned?

The proposed mandatory Internet filtering will only apply to content hosted outside of Australia. Presently, prohibited content hosted outside of Australia is added to a blacklist that you can opt into. Under the proposed system, the subset of prohibited content that is refused classification content would be blocked mandatorily.

However, none of this applies to sites hosted in Australia. ACMA can still issue a take-down, or link-deletion notice, to any site hosting, or linking to, R 18+ content that is not subject to a restricted access system (or other prohibited content). And you can be fined $11,000 per day if you don’t comply with the notice by 6:00 pm the next business day.

There are also state laws that are relevant. For example, the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Act 1995 (SA) s 75D makes it an offence to make available or supply R 18+ content using an online service, unless the content is subject to a restricted access system. So, it appears that it’s illegal for South Australians to link to this video (unless they comply with the very onerous restricted access system requirements). The law in your state or territory may vary.

What’s the Point?

The point wasn’t to criticise the Classification Board’s judgment or ACMA’s judgment. They’re merely fulfilling their obligations under the law. The point was to demonstrate how Australian classification law can affect your ability to view significant material because it is disturbing.

It also illustrates the hopeless of trying to suppress content on the Internet. It took 64 days for ACMA to respond to the complaint, and it’ll take even longer before the content is actually added to the IIA Family Friendly Filters.

Of course, it’s trivial to bypass IIA Family Friendly Filters, and it’ll be just as trivial to bypass any mandatory filter. And there are many sources for this particular content, other than the three URLs that ACMA has now blacklisted.

The final and most important point is that all of this is merely anecdotal. The treatment of this particular content is irrelevant. The question is whether you want to decide what content is significant, and what content is too disturbing, for yourself. Or would you like the Classification Board’s decision to be binding on you?

This post is not intended as legal advice. I make no representations whatsoever as to its quality, and will not be liable for any loss, injury, or damage howsoever resulting from it. Seek independent legal advice.

There was some news recently about the proposed clarification of Queensland abortion law after hospitals started avoiding drug-induced terminations. And, while it’s not directly relevant to this post, it reminded me of how the abortion debate has been ‘resolved’ in South Australia.

The Criminal Law Consolidation Act 1935 (SA) ss 81 and 82 criminalise abortion. But s 82A provides an exception for medical termination of pregnancy in certain circumstances:

(1) Notwithstanding anything contained in section 81 or 82, but subject to this section, a person shall not be guilty of an offence under either of those sections—

(a) if the pregnancy of a woman is terminated by a legally qualified medical practitioner in a case where he and one other legally qualified medical practitioner are of the opinion, formed in good faith after both have personally examined the woman—

(i) that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve greater risk to the life of the pregnant woman, or greater risk of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman, than if the pregnancy were terminated; or

(ii) that there is a substantial risk that, if the pregnancy were not terminated and the child were born to the pregnant woman, the child would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped,

and where the treatment for the termination of the pregnancy is carried out in a hospital, or a hospital of a class, declared by regulation to be a prescribed hospital, or a hospital of a prescribed class, for the purposes of this section; or

(b) if the pregnancy of a woman is terminated by a legally qualified medical practitioner in a case where he is of the opinion, formed in good faith, that the termination is immediately necessary to save the life, or to prevent grave injury to the physical or mental health, of the pregnant woman.

So, this section, apparently originally formulated when a ‘medical practitioner’ could only be a ‘he’, provides that a pregnancy can be terminated so long as the termination poses less risk to the life of the woman than the pregnancy does (not only if the pregnancy carries abnormally high risk).

What’s interesting about this is that, on its face, it appears to be an exception, but it may really just about be the rule. According to the Williams Manual of Obstetrics (21st ed, 2001) at 45:

The risk of death from abortion performed during the first 2 months is about 0.6 per 100,000 procedures. The relative risk of dying as the consequence of abortion is approximately doubled for each 2 weeks of delay after 8 weeks’ gestation.

That compares quite favourably with the rates that I could find of death per 100,000 live births in Australia: from 4 (2005 WHO figures) to 8.4 (1997–99 AIHW figures) to 11.1 (2000–02 AIHW figures).

This is consistent with these two papers, which suggest that surgical abortion in the first 16 weeks is safer than live birth. (But please don’t confuse my hasty research for something that has academic merit.)

There are a few other requirements in the section, such as a requirement that the woman reside in South Australia for at least two months prior to a s 85A(1)(a) termination. Of course, no one really checks.

And isn’t this all unnecessary and messy? How long until South Australia gets the Victorian version?

This post is not intended as legal advice. I make no representations whatsoever as to its quality, and will not be liable for any loss, injury, or damage howsoever resulting from it. Seek independent legal advice.

Today, Online Opinion posted an article by Abigail Bray, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Western Australia, which is summed up perfectly by Geordie Guy on Somebody Think of the Children:

She writes how a ‘couple of weeks ago’, which I’ll presume is some sort of modern parlance for the ‘in a reproducible experiment performed under controlled conditions’ we expect from academics who submit articles for publication, she went looking for pornography. Astoundingly she found it.

Naturally, people flocked to reproduce Abigail Bray’s experiment of searching Google for ‘sex’. What was surprising was that the results varied significantly for different people. So, I tried myself, and I found that the results were very different when searching Google for ‘sex’:

… than they were when searching Google Australia for ‘sex’ on Australian sites:

Both searches were performed with the default settings: SafeSearch set to medium, logged out of any Google account, and with no cookies. Your results may vary depending on your settings (and your location).

Of course, you would expect Google results to vary when searching different countries. But I hadn’t expected such a large degree of variation. I had assumed that sex was a universal topic.

Update: Made corrections in response to comments by Alan J Lee, Omegatron, and Jim Stewart below. In particular, I had forgotten to mention that I constrained the search on Google Australia to Australian sites.

Here are my results searching Google Australia for ’sex’ without limiting the search to Australian sites:

And I had forgotten (somehow) that hosting pornography in Australia is at least impractical, as ACMA can issue a take-down notice that requires the host to remove such content by 6:00 pm the next business day or face $11,000 per day fines.

So, it’s not at all surprising that far fewer pornographic sites would come up when searching only Australian sites.

Today, Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) announced that its host had received a final link-deletion notice from ACMA directing them to remove a link to a page on the AbortionTV website that EFA included in an article appropriately titled ‘Net censorship already having a chilling effect’.

EFA has since complied, replacing the original link with the following:

REDACTED. The original title of the page was “AbortionTV Pictures #6”, and can presumably be found using major search engines.

One of the ironies is that by issuing these notices, ACMA has probably driven more traffic to the AbortionTV website than any other organisation. If googling the text quoted above is too much trouble, people can always use the notice itself as a handy reference.

The other interesting thing about this notice, as Mark Newton points out, is that Andree Wright from ACMA testified at a Senates Estimates hearing on 23 February 2009 that the AbortionTV site was added to the blacklist because there was a substantial likelihood that it would be refused classification.

From memory, it was a page that contained no text, just pictures. The pictures were of aborted and dismembered foetuses. The graphic nature of the presentation without any contextualisation of the images meant that the images were judged on their own merits for their impact and their severity. We have kept a careful watching brief on the way the Classification Board has handled those types of images. On a previous occasion, we made a referral to the Classification Board on very similar material and it came back as ‘refused classification’. So we juxtaposed the two decisions and judged it on the images.

That meant that, at the time it was added to the blacklist, the content was ‘potential prohibited content’, which meant that the Classification Board had not actually classified the content.

This latest notice states that the content is ‘prohibited content’. That means that the Classification Board has now actually classified it, and the notice states that the classification is R 18+. Presumably, the Board classified this content after ACMA issued Whirlpool’s host an interim link-deletion notice.

Download: Sublime IP Final Link-Deletion Notice (298 KB)

Update: Nic Suzor pointed out that a summary of the Classification Board’s decision is available here.

Around noon yesterday, four weeks late for April Fools’, Steve Waddington of Exetel announced that Exetel would run its own Internet filtering trial, independently of the Government-run trial. The kicker? There is no ability to opt-out of the trial.

The announcement states that the purpose of the trial is to give engineers and administrators an opportunity to understand the filtering technology, its implementation, and its costs.

We anticipate that the implementation of this NetClean system will have no impact for any end user. However, if you suspect you have been impacted, please post your experience here and we will investigate and report back.

Most curiously, the announcement states

Any opinions or comments relating to your personal views on government filtering should be directed to your local MP.

The trial is set to start today and is expected to run ‘a few days to a week’.

Technical Summary

Last Friday, Steven Waddington posted some technical details about the NetClean WhiteBox that Exetel would use. You can get the firsthand information here.

If I understand correctly, the system is set up as a BGP neighbour. It queries DNS servers for the IPs of all blacklisted sites. It then poisons the attached network by advertising hostroutes for these IP addresses with itself as the next hop.

Since ISPs do this kind of routing anyway, so long as the blacklist is small (less than around 10,000 IPs according to the system’s makers), there should be no discernible impact on performance.

When a request is routed to the filtering system, the filter inspects it to determine whether the specific URL requested is on the blacklist. That way, when blacklisted content shares an IP with non-blacklisted content, the non-blacklisted content isn’t blocked.

It’s an elegant solution, insofar as it’s a clever implementation of bad policy.

No Opt-Out

Steven Waddington confirmed in a reply to a comment to his technical post that there’s no ability to opt out. In the forum, it’s explained that it’s technically infeasible for this system to allow end-users to opt-out.

I’m not intimately familiar with this technology, but I don’t see why that would be the case. The system would only have to check for an opt-out preference after it receives a routed IP and has confirmed that the requested URL is blacklisted. This should occur for relatively few requests with a small blacklist.

Of course, you can still ‘opt-out’ by using a proxy server, a VPN, or Tor.

What’s Filtered

Steve Waddington’s technical post states that the makers of the NetClean WhiteBox, Watchdog International (whose motto is appropriately ‘get the worst out of the Internet’), are supplying Exetel with a list of 198 IPs. What does it contain?

It’s a technical trial so it really doesn’t matter. If ever a law is passed that requires Exetel [to] use a list of sites then the Australian Federal [Government] would be the only issuing authority.

So we don’t know what’s on the list, but we do know that the list won’t be expanded during the course of the trial. The system only works with small blacklists, and doesn’t support any kind of dynamic filtering.

Conclusion

The key points are that Exetel is running a filtering trial with no-opt out mechanism. It’s using a blacklist of 198 unknown IPs. There is no dynamic filtering, and seemingly no plans for any trial of such technology.

It’s likely that Exetel customers won’t notice a change, other than a sinking feeling of knowing that they are one step closer to an Orwellian Australia.

This post covers recent events and may contain errors or inaccuracies. Exetel hasn’t provided an official statement detailing this trial, and much of the information posted here is from semi-official sources.

I am opposed to any plan for mandatory filtering of online content.

There are many reasons why the proposed mandatory Internet filter in Australia is a joke. One reason is that the government is convinced that adult Australians need a nanny to protect them from offense.

Senator Stephen Conroy recently confirmed that a bureaucrat will decide what material offends you and it will be blocked, because you need to be protected from material rated R 18+, X 18+, or RC. If you don’t want his protection, let him know.

It’s a puzzling aspect of the censorship debate that the government is pushing ahead despite so little public support. Australians do not want censorship. The justification for censorship in spite of public opinion is often that availability of immoral material prompts rape and violent crime. However, that view is not empirically supported:

The results above suggest that potential rapists perceive pornography as a substitute for rape. With the mass market introduction of the world wide web in the late-1990’s, both pecuniary and non-pecuniary prices for pornography fell. The associated decline in rape illustrated in the analysis here is consistent with a theory, such as that in Posner (1994), in which pornography is a complement for masturbation or consensual sex, which are themselves substitutes for rape, making pornography a net substitute for rape.

There is also some interesting empirical evidence showing a drop in violent crime when violent movies are released, presumably because violent people are too busy watching the movies to be violent themselves. And there is this brief summary of research on the effects of violent video games.

Criticism of such research by moralists like Robert Peters (not to be confused with valid criticism and studies showing that such content has some detrimental effects) consists of statements like ‘“Conclusive scientific data” is not necessary’ and ‘Used for the benefit of mankind, the scientific method is a marvelous tool, but it has limitations’. Indeed, the scientific method has never agreed particularly well with Victorian morality, as demonstrated by the Victorian-era anatomical illustration on the left.

And, for the most part, Australians are not afraid of immoral content and its sociological effects.

The results of Whirlpool’s 2008 Australian Broadband Survey show that only 2% of Labour voters supported Labour’s filtering policy. And 90% of respondents indicated that they would opt out of any filter of adult material.

Similarly, the issue that generated the highest number of complaints to the Classification Board was not that violent material slipped through, but that Grand Theft Auto IV had to be toned down to meet Australia’s MA 15+ rating because we do not have an R 18+ rating for games.

The fact is that the previous government’s Net Alert Scheme didn’t fail. People who wanted censorship got it for free. All 26 000 of them.