Fran Foo | December 05, 2008
TELSTRA chief operating officer Greg Winn says the federal Government's attempt to censor the internet is akin to trying to "boil the ocean".
"My view on that is that's like trying to boil the ocean ... to think that you're going to be able to centrally filter everything, I think that's a pipe dream," Mr Winn told reporters and analysts yesterday.
Child protection agencies have welcomed the Government's move to filter the internet but civil libetarians, ISPs and the technical community have rallied against it for various reasons.
The Government plans to have two streams of filtered content.
The mandatory portion will adhere to a blacklist of thousands of illegal web pages managed by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and an optional clean feed of URLs that would automatically censor content, mostly adult material.
Mr Winn agreed with broad comments from the ISP community that internet filtering would make surfing the web a slower process.
"The one thing I do know is that once you start filtering, then you're going to add latency no matter what," he said.
The Government has invited ISPs and mobile phone providers to participate in a live internet filtering trial, releasing details of its long-awaited call for expressions of interest (EOI) on November 10.
ACMA has completed closed lab trials of ISP content filtering conducted by Enex TestLab. The live pilot, however, is the first step towards evaluating whether content filtering at a network provider level is feasible in Australia.
The trial will test against ACMA's blacklist that currently contains 1300 URLs and may expand to approximately 10,000 links.
The list mainly contains web pages of child sexual abuse web sites.
The deadline for the EOI is next Monday and the Government would like the trial to kick-off by December 24.
The nation's largest telecommunications provider, Telstra, still hasn't decided if it plans to play ball.
Meanwhile, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy came under fire this week for failing to reveal details of the trial.
During question time on Wednesday Senator Conroy was asked how many participants would ISPs have to enlist for the live trials to be credible.
South Australian Liberal MP Cory Bernardi also asked if the results of the trials would be independently verified.
Senator Conroy couldn't provide answers to both questions within the two-minute timeframe provided.