In a letter to the Minister for Information Technology, Senator Richard Alston, the CEO of Connect.com has said that instituting censorship software on its network could cost around $1.5 million.
In an open letter to Senator Alston, John Stuckey, Connect's CEO sought to counter recent remarks made in the media about trials his company is holding of Internet filtering software.
Connect has been trialing the use of a server side filtering solution called 'Internet Sheriff' which is being developed by Brisbane based company Clairview. In recent weeks a number of supporters of the government's Internet censorship regulations have pointed to the product as one way of censoring the Internet.
However Stuckey's letter makes it clear that the system is as yet untested and would be likely to be expensive to implement.
'It MUST be made very clear that "The Sheriff" is an untried product,' he wrote. 'The overhead associated with implementing the product across our whole network would be in excess of $1.5 million dollars. Further, we have already seen ways of "The Sheriff" being bypassed by clever application.'
The letter goes on to note that while Connect is trying to make the technology work that Stuckey feels that if this is a central part of the proposed censorship proposal that it should be carefully considered.
'If the review committees are seeking to rely on this technology as a key component of the argument for enforceability then I believe connect.com.au's technical team should have the opportunity to present the reality of what is being sold, opposed to what actually is deliverable.'
