The government's filtering scheme - Why it won't work

Since coming into power, the Federal Labor government has done its best to stir up the boiling pot of opinion around the content filtering issue, announcing recently that it would put new measures in place to protect children from accessing adult and violent content online.

Labor's telecommunications minister Stephen Conroy wants to make it mandatory for ISPs to provide content filtering to houses and schools to free them of inappropriate material.

As a service provider, Telarus believes that the government's filtering scheme is nothing more than a knee-jerk reaction to calls for better control over Internet content, both in terms of children accessing inappropriate content and in the proliferation of child pornography.

Any proposed policy around content filtering is unlikely be successful in either instance as it has been proposed that URL filtering be used but there are any number of ways to defeat these filters. As a result such a scheme will offer little benefit despite significant cost in time and money.

It is also important to note that a lot of content is now distributed in ways that effectively bypasses such filters, with peer-to-peer software being the prime example. Ultimately, people will find ways around these filters – especially today's tech-savvy kids!

Apart from PC's and laptop computers, mobile phones and other devices such as Apple's iPod and Sony's PSP present their own challenges in terms of content control. For example, kids routinely now swap content for viewing on an iPod or PSP directly rather than accessing it via the Internet.

The government wants ISP's to filter access to content from their networks. Not only is it costly to deploy and manage systems for content filtering but it is likely that Internet performance will also suffer. A study commissioned by the government found that server-based filters reduce Internet performance by anywhere between 18 per cent and 78 per cent.

Obviously this is concerning, but it's important to note that should the government want to provide more granular filtering (products that delve deeper than just the URL of the website in question) to improve effectiveness, there will be an even greater impact on performance.

Quite frankly, with the exception of smaller service providers, such systems just would not be able to keep up with the flow of traffic and/or would cause a significant impact on network performance.

Ultimately, adult supervision and PC-based filters are probably the best methods for controlling access by children to inappropriate content from a PC.

Jules Rumsey
Managing Director
Telarus