The ALP went to the polls last year with a plan to keep Australian children safe online. That plan was to create a "clean", child-safe Internet feed that would be provided, by law, to every home and school in the country. Since then, the ALP has won Government and allocated over a
hundred million dollars to its cyber-safety agenda. So just what do we have in store for us?
At first blush, it might not seem like such a bad idea to filter out the sex and violence so that parents can let their young children use the Internet without worrying that they'll come across something that might distress them. (I wouldn't want my children watching Rick Astley dance without an adult present to explain.) A quick look at the Government's plan, though, is very alarming. Not only does it show a profound lack of understanding about how the Internet really works, it's a bad policy for the children, too.
What they plan is to mandate, by law, that all Australian ISPs run real-time content filtering software on all connections to Australian homes and schools. Although the filter is to be mandatory, there have been indications that the it will be opt-out, but this is by no means guaranteed. The filter would block access to a list of URLs maintained by the ACMA, and would analyse page requests in real-time looking for content "inappropriate" for children. The ACMA recently conducted a
trial of five brands of filtering software, which was hailed by the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, as a success and a model for moving forward with the plan to apply it to the country's entire Internet.
You can probably come up with a few objections to this idea off the top of your head, but let's start with the obvious ones. Can this be done technically? The ISPs would say, "no," certainly not without an enormous impact on the speed and cost of consumers' Internet access. In the Government's own trial, the filters tested slowed down network speeds by an average of about a third, even on the small test network. Even with the ACMA's own test data, the filters blocked about 3% of harmless web pages, and failed to block as much as 15% of "unsafe" content. The expense to the ISP to install and maintain filters for their entire customer base would be enormous, and no customer would put up with the
slow and unreliable service they would be getting for higher prices than they currently pay.
Even if the software could be realistically installed and maintained, is this something we want our Government doing? If you're thinking about the Great Firewall of China, you're not the only one. Who would decide what sites went on the blacklist? Which Government agency would determine which keywords should get a page blocked? How would one go about getting a page unblocked? Just who gets to be the arbiter of what's "appropriate" for a child to see? You don't have to be exactly paranoid to have a few qualms about the Government having this level of control over what you can see in your home. After all, it's not hard to imagine the list expanding under pressure from various lobby groups. Is a website about anorexia appropriate for children?
Indeed, given the diversity in the Australian population, one has to wonder about this "one size fits all" policy. Pick any two family homes in Australia and there will be differences in what's considered "appropriate" from one to the next. What if my kid is 15 and yours is 9 years old? What if your family is Christian and mine are unbelievers? Each parent will have a different opinion on what their own child should be allowed to see. Very of few of these parents would want to abrogate this responsibility to a government minister or bureaucrat. Most of those parents are Internet users themselves, too, and would want unrestricted access. But this is only possible with a PC-based filter - an ISP-level filter takes no account of the different needs of users within the same household.
Setting all these other objections aside, could this still be a good policy for the children? It's hard to see how. Even the Government's own research on online risks doesn't support the idea of Internet filtering. Children do face
real risks online, such as viruses, identity theft, cyber-bullying and even chat-room predators. A filter would do exactly nothing to mitigate these risks. So-called "content risks", that is, accidental exposure to inappropriate content online, are much less significant than these other factors, and there is little in the way of hard evidence to suggest that kids are being bombarded with such material or that it is doing them any harm. In other words, the clean-feed filter is an expensive solution without a problem. There are better ways to spend a hundred million dollars if you want to safeguard the welfare of children.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it's abundantly clear than Australians don't want the filter. Only a third of households with Internet connections have school-age children in them, and of these houses, only a third have filters installed for their children. Polling data shows that the rest simply don't think the benefits of filtering are worth the costs. Only 13% of Internet users polled in
Whirlpool's broadband survey thought the policy was a good idea. If you're one of the majority who strongly object, go to
nocleanfeed.com to see how you can help lobby your representatives to abandon this unworkable plan.
For more information, please see
the no clean feed site. For some good blogging on the subject, see
Somebody Think Of The Children .
Coming Soon - Censored Internet
