Internet Censorship Machine Quietly Revs up

“While the RC review is going on, work is underway to support voluntary filtering of child abuse content, which Telstra, Optus and Primus undertook to voluntarily block.”

He said the government saw the blocking of the Interpol list as an “interim step” before ACMA's child abuse list is adopted. Net industry prefers Interpol to ACMA

A spokesman for the Internet Industry Association (IIA) said while individual ISPs could decide to filter ACMA's list, the industry's view was that it preferred to deal with Interpol and the Australian Federal Police as opposed to ACMA.

Dealing with Interpol and the police “very clearly ferments the proposition that the cooperation they're seeking from ISPs is of a law enforcement nature and not one of censorship … we get away from any idea that we're implementing effectively mandatory filtering through the backdoor”.

“I think there is some uncertainty around the legal status of ISPs acting upon notifications from ACMA versus that which they may receive from the police where the legal powers are far more clearly defined under the Telecommunications Act,” the IIA spokesman said. Internet censorship 'futile'

Stephen Collins, spokesman for the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said any attempt to filter the internet was inevitably futile.

“Any action taken as a consequence of the making of such a list barely scratches the surface of activity related to child sexual abuse, which doesn't take place on the public web and is rarely available via it,” said Collins.

“Even if we're not talking about child sexual abuse material, trying to classify the web is futile. It's too big, too fluid.”

The IIA said these criticisms missed the point as the filter was just “one piece of the puzzle” and would ideally work in conjunction with an effective legal framework, policing and education campaigns.

University of Sydney associate professor Bjorn Landfeldt, who has been a high-profile critic of Senator Conroy's mandatory filtering scheme, said he had no issues with a voluntary scheme that only targeted child abuse links.