Controlling the Internet

There's noises emanating from elements of the Federal Liberal party back bench about blocking unsavoury content from the Internet.

This is not new, of course, they've already tried it before. Memory serves me that a regulatory framework was devised as an attempt to buy Brian Harradine's vote on some issue or other. This temporarily certailed a lot of local adult content, but the site owners simply moved to servers off shore and out of reach of the Australian authorities.

So now the censorship proponents want to block the content before it reaches us.

I have mixed feelings on this issue. As a parent, I don't want my kids accessing this sort of material and we have a strict regime of control over the home PCs to prevent this. As an adult, I don't want to be told what I can and can't watch. As an engineer, I don't want regulatory measures effecting the performance of the Internet, especially measures that I suspect will not be effective.

The details of how the proponents of censorship propose to block the content are sketchy. I assume it will use some sort of blacklist at the ISP level. How they expect to keep track of the shifting sands of the millions of questionable sites is beyond me. They could use keywords, I suppose, but that would eliminate half the Blogosphere let alone your average porn site.

The may propose the Chinese method and funnel all external traffic through a handful of gateways. Expect 'broadband' to be not so 'broad' if they take that path.

In my experience, blocking sites comes with unintended consequences. An innocent site with a link to a blocked one may make the innocent site unreachable.

Another danger is that once a regulatory framework is in place, it doesn't take much to control other information. Just look at the way the Chinese authorities filter content to their population.

Control will never stop the nasties, it will just push them underground. Suspect sites will not be on DNS, and encryption will make the traffic difficult for the authorities to monitor.

Hopefully, Helen Coonan will resist the zealots and not introduce measures that are ineffective and will cripple the net.

Freedom of information has advantages that far outweigh the disadvantages. It's up to individuals to control what they and their dependents access.