Net filtering may not be mandatory

[David Bird]

THE Rudd Government has indicated that it may back away from its mandatory internet filtering plan.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today told a Senate estimates committee that the filtering scheme could be implemented by a voluntary industry code.

Senator Conroy’s statement is a departure from the internet filtering policy Labor took into the October 2007 election to make it mandatory for ISPs to block offensive and illegal content.

Responding to questions from shadow communications minister Nick Minchin on how the government may go about imposing the internet filtering scheme, Senator Conroy said that legislation may not be required and ISPs may adopt an industry consensus to block restricted content on a voluntary basis.

“Mandatory ISP filtering would conceivably involve legislation … voluntary is available currently to ISPs,” Senator Conroy said.

“One option is potentially legislation. One other option is that it could be (on a) voluntary basis that they (ISPs) could voluntarily agree to introduce it.”

In response Senator Minchin said he had never heard of a voluntary mandatory system.

Senator Conroy responded with “well they could agree to all introduce it”.

The Government is currently spending around $300,000 on an industry filtering trial involving nine internet providers. The results of the trial, which are expected to inform its final policy, are expected to be handed to Senator Conroy in late July or early August.

The estimates committee was told that 30,000 internet users across the nine ISPs had been invited to participate in the trial.

Advisors from within the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy took on notice a question as to how many customers had agreed to sign up for the pilot.

Late today a spokesman for Senator Conroy said that the department was not allowed to reveal how many subscribers had participated in the trial due to terms of its agreement with the participating ISPs. He referred to previous statements affirming that the outcome of the trial would not be affected by the number of participants.

“The trial is examining different filtering technologies in a live internet environment. In particular, Enex Testlab will assess the performance of the filter on internet speeds. A scalability assessment will also be undertaken to assess the impact of the filtering solution on internet access speeds with higher levels of traffic and customers,” the spokesman said.

He refused to clarify the minister's comments when asked whether the Labor government was prepared to accept a voluntary ISP-level internet filtering scheme.

The committee was also told that the department had recently agreed to give internet provider Primus around $14,300 to purchase equipment that would help test how the filter would perform when large numbers of customers were involved.

The primary goals of the trial are to measure how accurately the filtering technology can perform in recognising and blocking sites on the communications watchdog’s blacklist of refused classification web pages and its impact on internet speeds.

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