Australian internet filtering trial has no success criteria
Australian internet filtering has taken a back seat coverage wise whilst we wait and see the results of the current live trials taking place with various ISPs. What with the government announcing that there’s no “criteria to determine whether trials of the scheme are a success”, the current trials appear to be nothing more then a raw stress test to see what filtering equipment can cope with rather then a trial of the filtering concept itself.
It’s nothing short of a farce that the trials have gone ahead without a clear and definable success criteria in place. With the trial results due to be published in July and no criteria to measure the results by we’re quickly heading full steam ahead into a massive waste of taxpayer funds.
I’d love to see the trials fail but without success criteria it’s well… you know, impossible.
To rub salt into the wounds of the trials also comes the news that Conroy is backing off from his original ‘clean up the internet’ proposals and is looking to just ban RC content.
What is still confusing however is that RC content is legal to own and view in Australia but it cannot be bought, sold or publicly displayed regardless. There is also the proviso it does not contain illegal content (enter child pornography etc.) but this is within the boundaries of existing law.
As for the rest of the content, the government is hoping “that ISPs will offer additional filtering services – as an optional extra to customers – to block this content.”
Yeah I wouldn’t be holding my breath on that one guys.
Also in the news this week is that the process of putting a single URL on the ACMA blacklist will come at a cost of $90,000. Now i have no idea why the government pays someone $90,000 to copy and paste a URL to a text file before sending it off to ISPS for filtering but goddamn where do I sign up for this gravy train?
According to ACMA, 51 per cent of the blacklist, or 499 URLs, is RC content.
This means that out of the 109.5 million plus websites (these are separate domains, god knows how many individual web pages there are) operating in May 2009, Australian taxpayers are going to pay just under fifty million dollars to censor 0.000045% of websites on the internet.
Yeah, that ought to stop children from finding porn on the internet no worries.
Just to illustrate how comprehensively stupid this whole ordeal has been and how easily it can be circumvented, I’ll leave you with this story on Microsoft’s new search engine ‘Bing’:
In Australia, the US, and Europe, any Bing user can search for “sex” and receive thousands of results. Using a unique new feature, users can access explicit videos without leaving the search results page.
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