Telstra has decided not to participate in the government's controversial ISP filtering trial, for which expressions of interest were due today.
(Credit: ZDNet.com.au)
The company said its decision had been reached "primarily due to customer management issues" and stressed that Telstra would keep working with the government on filtering outside of the trial, including evaluating technology to block blacklists, since it had "no fundamental difficulties with a legislated regime for blocking a defined ACMA blacklist of illegal sites".
The six-week trial, which was scheduled to start 24 December, involves either just blocking access to websites on the Australian Communications and Media Authority's black list or additionally filtering non web-based applications such as peer-to-peer networks.
There have been concerns about the costs involved and the accuracy of filtering technology with many other service providers opting out of the trial. ZDNet.com.au rang around to see who had put in an expression of interest to be part of the trial and who had not.
| Company | Put in EOI? | Why/Why not? | Other comments on filtering | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Telstra | No | Customer management issues | ISPs should not be responsible for setting the rules on content. "Internet service providers should not serve as de facto sheriff, judge and hangman; they should instead implement policies agreed by elected governments to be in the public interest", Telstra media head Justin Milne said in an editorial sent to the Age. | |
| Optus | Yes, only the ACMA blacklist | "To accurately gauge the impact that this type of filtering would have on its network," a spokesperson for the carrier said. | The trial would be limited to a specific geographic area, with customers given the option to opt out of the trial. | |
| iiNet | Yes | "To make sure the public, media and political players are well informed and realise that it is bad policy," the ISP's website said. "We hope that the outcome of this trial will be the final nail in the coffin of this misguided approach, which seems to re-surface with every new minister." | iiNet's position, described on the site, was that internet filtering did not work, would impact on networks' performance and that the scope of "unwanted" content would grow over time. | |
| Internode | No | No reason given | Internode MD has previously voiced concerns about the technical problems of internet filtering, such as speed reductions and false positives. "If the stuff goes a bit wrong it will start blocking other content. The trouble is, the internet's not just web browsers. Other applications that are using the internet may get mistaken for things that are pulling that content and might get blocked or messed with in strange ways," he said in an interview with ZDNet.com.au | |
| 3 | Unknown | N/A | N/A | |
| AAPT | No | No reason given | N/A | |
| Adam Internet | No | Too much on | CEO Scott Hicks said that Adam Internet would send a discussion paper to the government on what it thinks should happen — that is that the filtering not go ahead in its current form. | |
| Eftel | No | "We will wait to see the result of the trials and the impact these may have," a spokesperson said. | N/A | |
| Exetel | Unknown | N/A | "If someone said there's a blacklist of known child porn sites, then we'd do it," Exetel CEO John Linton said two months ago. | |
| iPrimus | Yes | "It's easy for us to do it," iPrimus CEO Ravi Bhatia said. | The timing of the trial was "doable" according to Bhartia. | |
| Netspace | No | "The filtering EOI as we received it was severely lacking in detail and the time frames were too unrealistic for us to participate," Netscape regulatory and carrier affairs manager Matthew Phillips said. | Netscape will be carrying out research to find out what its customers want in terms of filtering, Phillips said. | |
| People Telecom | No | "We are not convinced that content filtering makes practical sense and we are concerned at the potential risk to service quality," the company posted in a forum. | "We note also that there is a range of usable desktop-based content management solutions available today to most internet users," the forum continued. | |
| Soul/TPG | Unknown | N/A | N/A | |
| Unwired | Yes, but with provisos | Unwired appreciates the government's objectives. | The application's provisos would mean Unwired would be unlikely to be taken as a trial ISP, an Unwired spokesperson said. | |
| Vodafone | No | "We're just seeing how the trial unfolds," a spokesperson for the company said. | N/A | |
| Westnet | No | "We're just going to lean on the results of iiNet," a spokesperson for the company said. | N/A |
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