Conroy’s Filter Hits Online Business
November 5th, 2008 by Jonathan Crossfield
Online business in Australia is the forgotten casualty in the recent debates over Senator Conroy’s internet filter. This issue isn’t about censorship – it should be about the damage these plans could inflict on the internet economy.
Designed to not only block illegal websites but also to filter to ‘inappropriate’ content, Senator Conroy’s push for a two-tiered ISP filter scheme has come under increasing fire from the industry as having negative effects on the Australian internet space.
There is no doubt blocking illegal sites, such as child pornography, is a desirable strategy. As Senator Conroy has repeatedly stressed, such a filter was included as Labor policy at the last election and no one can convincingly argue for the right of the general public to view illegal websites. But the current filter technology being tested goes much further than Senator Conroy suggests.
The first tier of filtering blocks all illegal content that is held on a government blacklist. This is the filter that Conroy continually refers to in debates. But there is a second level filter, that by default will be applied across all ISPs and individual users will need to apply to unlock their own service from this filter. The purpose of this filter is to block content unsuitable for children – porn, gambling, etc.
The Great Debate
The problem with the debate as it is currently playing out is that both sides are arguing from different stand-points. Senator Conroy is sticking to the Government’s responsibility to address community concerns over content. Industry critics – such as the ‘No Clean Feed‘ action group – are arguing against deficiencies in the implementation of the filters and the potential damage to the Australian internet. This is why both sides seem to be at loggerheads over the issues.
This is not an issue about censorship. It is about a filter that will be damaging to our online economy. By getting sucked into a debate on censorship, the critics risk backing into a corner as arguing for the right to view porn is always going to be a contentious issue. On the other hand, slowing our already poor broadband speeds and risking damage to ecommerce has a more tangible impact.
Breaking the Internet
The tests that have so far been carried out with this technology have revealed some pretty poor results. In the report released by ACMA in July, and reported in The Age, of six ISP-level filter tests, five resulted in download speed reductions between 21% and 86%. Only one achieved an ‘acceptable’ 2% reduction.
While politicians and industry bodies debate and argue and protest, one possible repercussion has been overlooked. Online business has seen a steady increase over the last few years and recently pundits have predicted the internet economy as being potentially more resilient during the tougher economic times ahead.
But will ecommerce remain resilient under the threat of technical interference?
Larry Bloch, CEO of Netregistry, has been an advocate and commentator for the ecommerce industry for over a decade. “The filter could potentially be a drag on ecommerce performance and the online economy. The time it takes for a page to download dramatically affects the sales performance of the website. As it is reasonable to assume that all sites will suffer the same slowdown, this could lead to another form of website optimisation as businesses strive to improve the speed of access for their website.”
It is unlikely we will see the 86% slowdown reported in tests rolled out, but any filtering technology will result in some speed compromises. “Any filtering technology requires processing which has to reduce download speed. This downside has to be balanced against any perceived benefits,” says Bloch.
Small Business Carries the Cost
The problem is that there is a balance to be struck between speed and accuracy. To achieve the best accuracies and fewest false positives (mistakenly blocked websites) resulted in the largest slow downs. The most acceptable slow down of 2% returned the most incorrectly blocked websites.
Neither is a desirable scenario. Either online business contends with slower website loading and the effect that has on sales or there is the greater risk of becoming mistakenly blocked and losing sales while corrections are made to remove the false positive. These small businesses, already under threat from the economic slowdown, will need to bear the brunt of these losses and implement costly procedures to redesign and optimise.
“The suggestions as currently presented are too draconian and too heavily reliant on ISPs. I don’t think they have the balance right.”
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Filter porn sites today, but what will they filter in the future? How much control do they want?
A very simple solution to this problem in my mind would be as follows. All content originating from IP ranges assigned to Australian organisations would not be filtered. Any entity or person producing and hosting illegal content in Australia should be investigated an prosecuted through normal channels outside of the filter scheme. Then, all international traffic could be scrutinised more thoroughly. This would allow all legitimate Australian business to operate unaffected. The only downside here would be Australian businesses operating using overseas hosting services. This would however encourage Australian businesses to move to Australian operated hosting services, which in turn would inject much needed revenue in to the Australian internet services industry. Just my 2c anyway.
The disintegration of the individuals right to chose is a bit like the story of how to boil a frog alive, it is said that if a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if it is placed in cold water that is slowly heated, it will never jump out. Hence as Marcel R says start with Porn or the emotive issue of Child Pornography but what next and does the public ever notice that suddenly access to an internet that offers a platform for all views is restricted to the creators of a secret master list of admissible content?
I don’t know what gives anyone the right to decide what we can search, see, read and down/upload online. Surely it cannot be their holier-than-though view of life, the universe and everything? But if not that, then what? I’d like to make up my own mind, thank you very much. Today and tomorrow. I don’t need a bunch of bureaucrats to do it for me under the guise of protecting us.
Should this happen perhaps we can ask some 16-year-old school kid to hack the system in the first few hours of its existence.
The whole debate of a blocking sites is pointless anyway. If you want to bypass the filter it would be as simple as paying for an anonymous proxy service outside of Australia. The proxy then would hide anything that you are doing to the Australian Filter and allow you full access to any website you want to access.
Its not even a matter of hacking its a simple process to bypass this filter. A five minute job and at most $15 extra a month and you are back to your illegal sites without the government even seeing what you are doing anymore. Without the filter, at least people doing the wrong thing and not knowing what to do can still be caught.
All this does is keep the honest people honest, and make the ones who you are trying to catch harder to do so.
Apparently 55,000+ Australians are not too happy. GetUp is now asking for donations to support an advertising campaign.
Just in case anyone cares enough….
http://www.getup.org.au
“Any filtering technology requires processing which has to reduce download speed. This downside has to be balanced against any perceived benefits,” says Bloch.
“to protect Australian families and kids from some material that is currently on the net.” quote from Stephen Conroy (ABC interview)
Surely Block is not suggesting that protecting internet speeds is more important than protecting children against sites that are inappropriate (like porn/child-porn/gambling)?
Yes, there are ways around the Clean Feed, yes people can still access the information deemed ‘inappropriate content’, this Policy is about protecting children. I’m not sure know why people would be against this?
Of course all ISPs have always been against any form of censorship, and this article is just that in disguise. But we have censorship in society already on television, in newsagents, etc. It’s not open slather in society now, nor should it be on the Internet. Leftwing ratbags are against all forms of censorship, but Australians don’t want to accidently end up at a porn site. And the argument that it doesn’t work is rubbish. Client side filtering works, so why shouldn’t ISP-based filtering also work. Our firm uses an external mail forwarder to filter many thousands of emails per week, and that works wonderfully — filtering out the 90% of emails that are spam and viruses. I don’t see a huge difference in some of the technology to filter emails, compared to filtering the Internet. It can be done and should be done. Unfortunately, the ISPs need to be forced to do this because they do not have the social conscience to do it themselves. Sure there should be an adult bypass to allow adults access to whatever they like, but the filtering should be on by default. The sexualisation of society and women is rampant as porn purveyors rake in huge dollars enabling them to use sophisticated marketing to push their agenda. They are obviously against the filtering. But families want the peace of mind knowing their kids are not unwittingly going to be subjected to the filtered material.
This has nothing to do with protecting children, even children’s groups
say it’s useless and they do not want it:
This is about information control from the government.
It looks like Kevin Rudd spent too much time learning Mandarin and talk to Chinese bureocrats that he now wants to act like one.
China, Iran, North Korea have compulsory filters, now Australia.
It wasn’t enough to have anti terror laws that allow secret incarceration on secret charges, now this.
Sorry, link above missing :
http://www.smh.com.au/news/home/technology/internet-censor-plan-blasted/2008/11/28/1227491813497.html?page=2
So long to our businesses weekly online Tatts syndicate…
Okay. So they aren’t really talking online gambling, or even illegal online gambling (dog fights, etc).
Just the competing ones that don’t pay protection to the government…
Pro-Clean Feed: No one is against protecting children. The bottom line is that this “clean feed” does no more to protect children than the free content-filtering software made available by the previous government (in fact, it does considerably less). If families wanted their internet filtered it was a simple matter to download and install the free software to protect their own computer. One problem with the so called “clean feed” is that it takes the right to choose away from the individual or family. I am an adult and want to make my own choices about what content I view on the internet. I totally support your decision to limit what your child can and cannot see, but those restrictions should not automatically be forced on the rest of the adults in this “free” country.
David: Your e-mail analogy is flawed because of the method of delivery of an e-mail vs a website. When someone sends you an e-mail, it is filtered based on a whole host of heuristic algorithms. This can take time, but you wouldn’t notice because it happens before it even gets to your mailbox. Therefore when you check your e-mail you get all of the filtered e-mails instantly. If an e-mail is in the process of being analysed you wouldn’t even know, but if you were expecting an e-mail that you knew had already been sent, this would make it take longer to get to you. With a website, the content is delivered to you “on-demand”. You’ve just clicked the button and are waiting for it to load, which usually happens very quickly. With this proposed filter, a website will take almost twice as long to load, and you WOULD notice it because you’re sitting there waiting for it. Australia is physically very far from most sites on the internet, which due to the laws of physics already introduces a latency to our access of international sites. This system will make only make it worse.
Additionally, the downside of a single false positive in an email filtering program is slight. E-mails are filtered individually one at a time, so if one doesn’t get through all you lose is that one message (hopefully not an important one). The proposed filter cannot possibly filter individual websites using heuristic algorithms like an e-mail filtering program. This would take a long time and inevitably have a high rate of false positives. As such, they use a blacklist approach to block known “questionable” content. However, there is no way for an internet blacklist to contain information on every single page at a web domain. If a blogspot user posted “objectionable” content, it would not be easy to simply block Australians from that single blogspot account. Instead, the entire blogspot domain would need to be filtered, resulting in tens of thousands of legitimate, interesting, informative websites being blocked.
Those technical and social issues aside, I think B Allen has hit the nail on the head as to the most significant issue in this whole debate.
The proposed internet filter will block all illegal and “objectionable” content. I don’t have any problem with illegal content being filtered because ‘illegal’ is a term that is well defined. The term ‘objectionable’ is far more problematic because it has no strictly defined legal meaning, and there is no transparent, democratic procedure for deciding what is and isn’t “objectionable”. At the moment I think *most* Australians trust their government to make the right choices as to what should be seen as “objectionable”, but keep in mind that if this filter is codified into Australian law it will likely outlast the current government and many of its successors.
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that in 20 years time there is an extremist, self-described “Christian” cult who uses the internet as a medium to sway impressionable, rebellious teenagers to join their group. Then some kids get hurt or killed because of this group and there is public outcry. The weak-willed government decides that Christian content is “objectionable” and adds all known Christian websites to the internet blacklist to satisfy a vocal minority of lobbyists. This is exactly how reactionist, minority-interest lobby groups get to impose their will on all of us, and this is how slippery slopes put us in boiling water. It could be a far-right government censoring political dissent or a far-left government censoring religious views, but either way a lot of Australians would be very unhappy.
Thanks to everyone for their comments. It has been refreshing to see how strongly people feel about protecting our internet from the filter. As stated in the post, the argument that we should be ‘thinking of the children’ is a spurious one.
As reported in the SMH this week, the Save the Children organisation has critricised the cleanfeed as ‘fundamentally flawed’. If child welfare organisations don’;t believe the filter will protect children, what argument is left to put it in place?
Well put Kimota. Child advocacy groups (for the most part) realize that the proposed filtering scheme does not protect children from predators found in online chat rooms or any of the other legitimate dangers to children online. The chances of a child following links from a safe website to an unmoderated website and finally to a pornographic or otherwise unsuitable website are very small. It would be like a child on their way home from school getting off at the wrong bus stop, walking through a bad neighborhood and ending up in a brothel.
If a child’s parents have decided to let them ride the bus alone, they are going to have to teach their child what to do when something goes wrong. Get off at the wrong bus stop? Stay there and wait for the next bus. Stranger starts talking to you? Move away from them and sit somewhere else. Give them the tools to deal with the realistic dangers of the situation.
Similarly, if you choose to let your child use the internet unsupervised (and lets face it a lot of them are going to), talk to them about the dangers of the internet and give them the information to make good decisions. You can’t protect children from everything, but if you do your best to teach them to protect themselves, they will be ok!
Im a newbie in Online Business and i am still reading a lot on the internet about how to manage an Online Business