In one corner of the cyber ring you have the worlds largest internet company, Google. Google may or may not be attempting world domination through their ever -expanding, ever-increasing internet dominance.

Having said that, as far as dictators go, the world could do a lot worse then Google.

In the other corner you have Australian Senator Stephen Conroy. Stephen Conroy is the current Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy for Australia. Conroy’s current life ambition is to censor the internet in Australia with a mandatory ISP level internet filter.

Due to their inseparable link via the internet, Conroy and Google have for a while now been locked in an epic battle of discussion over internet filtering in Australia.

Last week this discussion completely broke down and came to an end.

Conroy accused Google of ‘the single greatest breach in the history of privacy‘ over it’s collection of unsecured wireless information.

Google meanwhile have maintained their stance on Conroy and his internet filtering plans. To paraphrase, ‘take your stupid internet filter and shove it’.

As the battle of words erupts and Conroy attempts to divert attention away from his filter antics via criticism of Google, Australia’s internet users are no doubt wondering who to trust.

Google or Conroy?

If the last week is anything to go by then it’s Google by a longshot. Over the last week Conroy seems to be doing everything he can to completely destroy public confidence in himself.

The week opened with Conroy announced the closure of an internet forum designed to facilitate discussion about internet filtering between Australian ISP’s and the government.

The forum was designed as a means to discuss technical aspects of ISP-level filtering, development of grants for optional filtering, developing of filtering tools and the secure transmission of the Refused Classification blacklist to ISPs


When asked if the finalised report based on the discussions held in the forum would be made public, Conroy put ‘the question “on notice” and effectively delay(ed) the answer‘.

From the guy who reasoned that a report that assessed proposals to build a public funded broadband network was not in the general public’s interest to be made public, ‘on notice’ is probably akin to ‘I’m going to bury this report so deep you’re going to need to give me a colonoscopy to get it out’.

Next Conroy proudly declared that via his internet filter he’d ‘consider blocking up to 50,000 websites based on new filtering technology that may become available in the future.’

One of the main criticisms of the proposed internet filter is that the scope of refused classification material is simply to large and that inevitably information that shouldn’t be on the blacklist will be blocked.

I don’t know about you but I have little faith in the government regulating (or overseeing the third party regulation) of a 100 strong website blacklist. The Australian government trying to manage a blacklist comprised of 50,000 websites sounds like a bloody nightmare.

Then just yesterday Captain Conroy informed us that regardless of public and corporate opinion, the proposed mandatory internet filter ‘is a policy that will be going ahead‘.

As an Australian voter and taxpayer, why do I feel like Conroy just shoved his penis into my mouth and told me to smile?

Speaking of corporate opinion, Conroy mysteriously claimed that

this policy has been approved by 85 per cent of Australian internet service providers, who have said they would welcome the filter, including Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and iinet.


Now I couldn’t find information or news of this near unanimous support of internet filtering by some of Australia’s largest ISPs anywhere. This leads me to believe that if true, the welcoming was expressed in the private forum (shut down last week) that was mentioned earlier.

The beauty of Conroy quoting information from this forum is that it’s not publicly accessible and from the sounds of it, a summary report that will be presented to Conroy won’t ever be made public either.

In short there’s no way to verify Conroy’s claims when he’s referring to his closed-to-the-public government internet filter forum.

Terrific.

Not that he needs any help digging his own political grave but Google have also weighed in and warned that Google TV might be the first indirect casualty of mandatory internet filtering.

With Google TV, Google aims to

bring the internet into the loungeroom of every TV-owning household in the world, with an ambitious new service that lets people mesh television viewing with surfing the web.


Naturally the service will rely heavily on sites like YouTube and this is where the problems start. One of the sore points between Conroy and Google has been the filtering of YouTube.

Conroy wants Google to internally censor YouTube but Google are refusing to agree to anything until they’ve seen some legislation. Conroy has previously admitted that filtering high traffic websites at an ISP level isn’t feasible, so he’s reliant on Google internally censoring the YouTube service.

The end result for Australian internet users is Google refusing to market Google TV in Australia due to potential degradation of the service as a direct result of Conroy’s internet filter.

…so much for just affecting access to refused classification material.

If my choices in who to trust are Stephen Conroy’s continual earth shattering parliamentary incompetence and Google harvesting unsecured wireless network data, I’m still going to side with Google.

Seriously who the hell runs an unsecured wireless network these days anyway?! These morons should be glad that some kids in a van outside didn’t blow their internet quotas downloading porn…

…at least they won’t have to worry about that happening once the internet filter goes live.


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