Sam

Very annoyed at the approach that Labor has taken to "filtering" the internet. As a young adult, the internet is very important to myself and most of my friends. I respect the idea of being able to provide a "filtered" internet service, however a blanket filter that covers every network link within australia is just too much. Not only will this be a relatively inefficient way to block such illegal content, it is bound to have false positives while it will slow down LEGITIMATE traffic. A much MUCH better solution is to provide the filtering software at the client(s) end. I run a transparent proxy on my network which can filter out illegal content, but I wouldn't want this for the whole of Australia. It's a very inefficient use of processing power to filter such a large amount of internet traffic against a huge blacklist. As far as I am aware, the previous government provided free filtering software to any home that requested it, surprisingly there was surprisingly LOW uptake (I know of noone who used it). In fact, I haven't spoken to anyone who has been impressed with the idea of filtering the internet, much less the attempt by Conroy, to implement. I also fail to see how FTTN can truly be successful if it's plagued by such inefficient and worthless traffic filtering. The irony is that such filtering most likely won't affect the ability of criminals to gain access to illegal content anyway. Also, how can the Minister expect P2P content to be effectively blocked? especially since many P2P software's use encryption to hide their type of traffic to routers. Stateful Packet Inspection can be very ineffective at filtering such encrypted traffic, while the overhead of such process is significant. I forecast a sharp rise in the number of Virtual Private Network's which will be setup simply for filesharing purposes; to dodge this filter. Does the Minister propose that all encryption and VPN's be outlawed within Australia? (remember that many businesses and home offices rely on VPN's to operate) A better solution that would have a much smaller footprint would be to simply filter illegal websites by providing ISP's with lists of domain names to redirect. This way the government can do their part in filtering out illegal content while not impairing the performance of our infrastructure. I know of many young people who voted labor because they believed in Kevin07 and "new leadership", in retrospect many probably won't be voting Kevin11 if such filtering schemes are mandated. I hope the Minister can see this filter in its current state; is doomed to failure. Such a scheme will only worsen the current state of Internet Services within Australia.