not happy

Not Happy Stephen Conroy

First the filter.

There is no way that the filter would effectively work under any circumstances. It is such a waste of taxpayers money. In times of recession, I believe that the money should be better spent on other initiatives such as additional funds for the NBN.

Why would it not work? Simple. There are many circumvention techniques such as Virtual Private Networks, Anonomous Proxies, TOR and the like, meaning criminals can still access the content. In the meantime, the general public is punished through slower speeds (yes filtering slows the internet down - by up to 75% read your own reports on the Ennex Trial, Conroy). Higher prices, due to ISP's having to fork out additional costs for equipment, higher latencies.

Conroy, you have stated that you'd like the filter to block illegal (not a problem) but also UNWANTED content. So what is unwanted? I propose we block your DBCDE contact page because the majority of Australians do not want to see your profile. You should choose another portfolio (god help us all) or resign.

Once a site is on the ACMA blacklist there would be no way of appeal (the blacklist is exempt from FOI). How about underblocking and overblocking? Accidently blocking a site that should not have been blocked? (see UK wikipedia case). Underblocking - not blocking a site which should be blocked.

This is a pathetic policy which ensures that the majority of people who have done nothing wrong get punished whilst the criminals will still access their 'illegal' material through circumvention techniques. Also how is the filter going to block out p2p, which is around 60-70% of all web traffic?

HTTPS? Filtering of https would be a major blow to the banking and other industries which rely on the protocol. By filtering https, it garantees that there will always be a man-in-the-middle attack going on, which defeats the purpose of HTTPS. Https is designed to be a secure form of transmission of information if the government decides to filter out https, then obviously it would not be secure anymore.

Also, noone wants the filter. If you paid more attention to the previous Government's Netalert program and actually compiled the statistics, you would have noticed that hardly anyone has downloaded the software, and even fewer people are using it now.

Finally on the issue, only the most stupid people (possibly an IQ of a 5 year old or worse) would put your so called 'child pornography' on port 80 (or even port 443). They would be put on some other random port, on a different protocol that is obviously harder to detect (my example would possibly be p2p but I assume those crime syndicates would have better technologies to circumvent filters and avoid detection).

So basically, your filter would be a huge waste of 43 million dollars of Australian taxpayer's money, whilst serving no purpose (easily circumvented) and punishing the general public with slower speeds. Great Conroy, well done indeed.

Now onto another topic, the NBN. I want to know how it would help people in new estates which are disadvantaged by Telstra Monopoly Boxes (oops sorry I meant CMuX's). These are basically FttN to begin with. However currently the incumberant has had plenty of problems (or rather problems due to their refusal to spend money on critical infrastructure) dealing with issues such as lack of backhaul and lack of ports these areas.

These areas have no competitor dslams and thus we have to suffer higher prices with substandard service. Whilst other places have adsl2+ with annex M, naked services and even vdsl trials, areas stuck on Telstra's Monopoly Boxes are paying around 50 dollars a month more than their exchange based counterparts.

Under a Telstra NBN it would be worse, with no competition and no innovation. If it wasn't for competition through third party dslam's we would most certainly be still stuck on 1.5mbit artifically capped adsl, low quotas.

Australia is a broadband backwater compared to many other nations, which are starting to roll out FTTH. Considering the government no longer owns the copper infrastructure, why is it so desperate to use it? Internet, phone and other infrastructure should be government owned, or at least regulated to promote competition. Currently there is not enough regulation when it comes with DSL. CMuX's/ISAM's and the like should be no different to exchange based services and competitors should be allowed access to deploy their own dslams.