Government considers free filters for small ISPs
- 11 March, 2010 16:27
- Comments 8
Small Internet Service Providers (ISPs) need not spend a cent to meet the national Internet filtering requirements in a move under consideration by the Federal Government.
Suzie Brady, spokeswoman for communications minister Stephen Conroy, said the government is considering a grants scheme for ISPs that introduce “wider levels of filtering on a commercial basis”.
A proposed government grant for dynamic filtering — the opt-in component of the scheme — should be sufficient to cover the price of deploying the mandatory blacklist filter, according to Netsweeper managing director, Michael Grace.
But in a written statement Brady reiterated the government's position that it should not need to pay, based on other developed countries that have deployed Internet filter schemes without public funds.
“In these countries, ISP filtering has also been implemented without imposing additional costs on to customers,” Brady said.
The department is also in talks with wholesale web filtering service companies for the possible purchase or development of blacklist filtering software that would be provided to small ISPs free of charge.
Brady said the government is holding consultations with retail and wholesale ISPs on the details of implementing mandatory ISP-level filtering. Telcos said yesterday, however, they had not received enough information to properly cost the roll out of Internet filtering.
Peter Mancer, managing director of New Zealand-based ISP, Watchdog and Netsweeper’s Grace criticised claims by ISPs that implementing the Internet content filter could cost up to $1 million.
“Some of these engineers talking about filtering have never put a [content] filter in,” Mancer said.
He said Australia should model its scheme on New Zealand’s optional Internet filter that went live today.
Mancer said the New Zealand government-run and operated scheme would cost Australian ISPs, excluding Telstra and Optus, less than $1 per customer, per year.
He said Telstra and Optus would likely need to run the filters on their own dedicated servers due to the huge number of subscribers.
“Only a very small amount of traffic is routed through to the filters, so it doesn’t require hugely scalable technology, but only a licence cost per user,” Mancer said.
The New Zealand Internet filter is run by the country’s Department of Internal Affairs, which hosts the filters single bank of government servers. An independent body oversees the operation of the Swedish Netclean WhiteBox filter and URL blacklist of child sexual abuse, according to a code of practice.
Mancer said Computerworld New Zealand had “got it right” in its reports that Telstra Clear, Telecom and Vodafone would implement the filter.
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Comments
Russ
Yes the ISP's pay for their filters in other countries because it's optional and hardly anyone opts for it.
So they spend very little on these snake oil products. Unlike the system we will get lumbered with here where everything will get shoved through the filter to find the one in a billion site that's blocked.
Dags
Yes I love the term FREE! :( So guess who will actually pay for them? Correct We will :(
And guess who will NEVER EVER vote LABOR again!
James Stevoss
Yes, New Zealand model - OPTIONAL not MANDATORY
Totally different kettle of fish, one is to actually help people, the other is to censor people.
How many people in NZ have taken up the OPTIONAL filter? please explain how this correlates with the cost of install.
hmm, less than 5% of the population opts-in to it, compared to australia where its 100% including business.
Australia and its government are a joke.
Mark Newton
Mancer is clearly someone who has installed lots of filters before, which don't work.
Richard Clayton (Cambridge University, UK) has gone into great detail about the weaknesses of hybrid systems such as Mancer's Whitebox, and as long as you're prepared to install something that's optional and that enables blacklist leaking, Mancer is your go-to guy.
(he himself has pointed out that including high-traffic sites on the blacklist blows his systems out of the water, so I'd love to hear what he plans to do about the half-dozen RC YouTube URLs that are currently on Conroy's list)
ISPs in New Zealand get away with using his systems cheaply because when they don't work their engineers can login to a router and type "neighbor x.x.x.x shutdown" to turn them off. As I said in yesterday's article, I could design and cobble together a relatively cheap system like that out of commodity equipment, there's nothing magical or mysterious about what Mancer's selling.
But if, unlike the case in New Zealand, the system is mandatory and ISPs can't turn it off, it needs to be designed completely differently -- it has to be able to handle high-traffic websites, peak loads, DDoS attacks, brain-failures at ACMA... and it has to do it all without imposing any performance degradation on end-users. And that's how you end up with a $1m estimate for an ISP with a few hundred thousand customers -- then you build it again twice as large next year, and every year thereafter.
And, having spent all that money, the Enex Testlab report shows that users can STILL trivially bypass it, meaning that the expenditure has achieved nothing.
Mancer will love that because he makes a killing every time he sells one of his worthless Whiteboxes, and gets to keep his money whether they work or not. But I'm pretty sure the people who are actually paying for it have a slightly different point of view.
- mark
Mark
You can't host porn in Australia. It's illegal, which is why it moved offshore. So to stop it entering the country, just filter the 4 or so incomming pipes where they land. No need for any ISP in the country to have a filter.
Couple of spare 586's, a fresh copy of link-assasin and GAFA (Great Australian Firewall Appliance) is up and running. Don't know what all the fuss is about.
monkeysee
If the filter scheme is optional, as in NZ and every other democracy in the world, the (adult) users aren't trying to actively fight against it and get around it because they CHOOSE to use it.
So its not under extreme load, and nor is it under continual attack. That's why it works and costs little.
We Aussies are being forced against our will to endure a useless online blockage that nobody wants or asked for and we truly resent.
That means resentful enough to vote Labor OUT as soon as we next get the chance.
Enjoy your single term of office Rudd, you've cost us taxpayers dearly with your endless stuff-ups and arrogant incompetence.
Baggyone72
To repeat a post on a similar article here on Computerworld:
Interesting that the NZ list of "child sexual abuse images" is 7000 URLs long, while the Internet Watch Foundation (considered leaders in tracking this stuff and thier list is used to maintain the UK blacklist) state that they have a list of 600-800 active sites at any one time. The Austalian blacklist has about 1200 URL's, but as disclosed to parliment, only about one third of those are child sexual abuse images.
So what are the extra 6000 odd URLs?
I think Kiwis need to start demanding a few answers.
For us Aussies...if the Kiwis have had this much scope creep already in their voluntary scheme, what can we expect from our mandatory list?
gnome
What we Aussies should expect from the secret government filter should be exactly what we're going to get.
First the smarmy intro about saving all the children, then the "strong, decisive solution" of a secret censorship apparatus, followed by continuing scope creep so that the people are no longer troubled by hearing any opposing points of view.
No wonder that our Sinophiles, Kevman and his sidekick Conboy, think that China has a wonderful system of controlling (preventing) free speech.
We should enjoy it while we can, because seditious thoughts like these will be deemed contrary to the security of the state. At least we won't be thrown in jail - that would be too revealing in our nominal democracy. But then, who would know?
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