If you haven’t heard of the plans by the Australian government to filter or block ‘illegal’ content on the internet in Australia, then go here and read about it.

One needs to understand the stated goals of Senator Conroy, and of the Labour party (that I voted for, for shame) so that you can understand what it is they are trying to do. They have used weasel words fairly effectively up to now, so not everyone has a clear understanding of their intent, but in a nutshell, it is this.

They want to put filters in place to block the objectionable stuff that is illegal in Australia – child pornography and stuff like it.

There are many problems with doing this, technically, and they’ve been well discussed. There are a lot of sites devoted to discussing why the plan will fail technically. The arguments at one end of the spectrum argue that it will be ineffective and will only make the internet slower, the others at the other end argue that it will be too effective and block too aggressively, blocking legitimate sites.

I believe that the reality will be somewhere in the middle. It will be ineffective only in that it will be inaccurate, and true accuracy will be impossible to attain.

For every website or URL that the government believes it is blocking, the content will be available in a hundred places elsewhere that they won’t know about. The blocklists will need to be huge, and by necessity the government will not be able to verify everything manually – so there will need to be some level of automation here – software will be used to patch keywords and do image pattern matching – and where you have software, you have errors.

Hardware manufacturers that make the machines that do the blocking and filtering must be salivating at the prospects, and certainly they’ll be the only winners in this environment.

And where will the money come from? Some of it will come from the government, but the rest will come from the people paying for the service. Australians already pay some of the highest access fees in the world. When one of these content filtering boxes costs $100,000, and you need 500 of them to effectively cover a medium sized ISP, you’re talking serious amounts of money for absolutely no benefit.

Not only that, but they will be ineffective against transferring of content via direct transfers on IRC or Instant Messenger networks. VPNs will be set up which pedophiles will use to trade files unhindered by filtering technology.

We will pay extra for our internet access, get a slower experience, line the pockets of hardware manufacturers, and the most bitter pill of all is that the people the government is trying to ‘protect’ will not be protected at all! Pedophiles will still hunt the internet looking for children to meet in malls, and they’ll still be trading illegal material on underground networks. Even websites will still be hosting this stuff and will still be available in Australia; they’ll just put the content behind SSL to hide it from the authorities.

The Labour Party won the last election partly due to the huge numbers of young voters that came out and voted against the Liberals, to send a clear message that we needed to end our involvement in Iraq.

However, they will lose the next election based on this bad decision to filter the internet, if they decide to continue with it. The young people of Australia, love the freedom that the Internet represents, and don’t want or need the government regulating it like it has tried to regulate everything else.