Family First have been called many names in the Australian media in the last few months, ranging from Political newcomer and right-wing conservative to a conspiratorial setup and the lunatic Right. To these colourful titles we can now add Simon Hayes and Jennifer Foreshew’s bogeyman for the IT industry.

CONSERVATIVE Christian party Family First has emerged as a new bogeyman for the IT industry, which is worried a reinvigorated Howard Government will trade the full sale of Telstra for a package of measures including mandatory internet filtering.

…

Internet Industry Association chief executive Peter Coroneos is promising to speak to Family First on the "realities of internet governance" in an effort to stymie the filter plans.

"We are highly concerned about statements that this party has made regarding the internet and we think it is particularly unhelpful and uninformed," he said.

Being a conservative Christian myself, I thought I’d have a bit of a look at this policy _{(pdf, 211KB)}, and see if it wasn’t just a bit more media beatup. The answer is: no, it’s not.

As a Christian & a techie, this policy worries me. It reads far too much like it was written by people who have been told about the internet, rather than by people who regularly use it. Take the following statement:

Family First will work to achieve Government commitment to establish a Mandatory
Filtering Scheme at the ISP Server Level in this country.

Whilst set up costs will be large at $45 million, Family First believes that this cost is
justified for the protection of vulnerable children within our community. Some or all
of the costs could be passed on to internet users.

(Emphasis theirs)

The idea of mandatory filtering is a wonderful idea. Unfortunately for a myriad of reasons, both practical & philosophical, it won’t work.

Practically, the idea is flawed. The cost of implementing such a scheme is very large, as the policy itself concedes, and would require either a large injection of funds from the government or increasing costs to users. While Family First seem to think either of these policies are acceptable, I don’t. I’m quite happy to pay for necessary & effective value-added services, but this is neither.

Cost aside, the actual practicality of filtering is flawed. I work part-time at an ISP. We attempted to roll out content filtering as a value-added service a while ago. The system was inherently flawed. It would continually return false-positives, while regularly failing to filter the content it was required to filter. As such, we have since removed the service. I know a large number of other ISPs in the same situation. Most ISPs, in attempting to adhere to the IIA regulations simply provide users with the ability to download programs like Net Nanny, which do content filtering at the user-level (which is where it belongs).

The reason why the filtering doesn’t work at the server level, is that the content is always changing. You can’t just block domains, because the domain names constantly change. You can’t just filter on words because a)the words can be obfuscated and slightly miss-spelled deliberately, and b)while some words may be obvious to block, others are not so simple. eg. you can’t block oral, sex, blow, etc.. as these are words that, in other contexts, are perfectly valid. This report from USA Today has a good summary of the practical failures of content filtering. A few highlights:

• America Online’s parental control feature - used by the majority of AOL’s 27 million users who are parents - fared best, blocking full access to 86% of objectionable sites. But AOL also blocked many legitimate sites (63%), including Rutgers University’s sex-ed site written by teens for teens, a guide to lesbian politics and a gun-owners’ rights site.
• Net Nanny and Cyber Snoop blocked less than half of objectionable sites: Net Nanny 48% and Cyber Snoop 10%. Those programs rely on parents to program in the types of sites they want to be off-limits and the level of limits. Net Nanny, the only filter that makes its list public, was one of only two filters that blocked access to a site with bomb-making instructions.
• Norton Internet Security, the most expensive program, blocked 80% of objectionable content, but also blocked a government site on drug abuse.

As I mentioned above, there are two problems with filtering, one practical, the other philosophical. The philosophical problem is summed up well by Jeff Fox, senior editor at Consumer Reports in the USA Today article:

But Fox points out that no standard exists on what is objectionable, so each company’s reviewers must use their own judgment. One anti-abortion site in his test featured color pictures of aborted fetuses. "It’s a highly-charged political issue, and there is a question, ‘Is that appropriate?’ regardless of politics. Cyber Patrol and AOL decided one way (block); all others didn’t. Standards aren’t made public for most software, and most parents don’t know who’s deciding. It’s like handing our kids over to a babysitter without being able to check references."

The question here is, who’s standards? Who decides? I’m pretty sure that the majority of the Australian population would not want an internet filtered to conservative Christian standards. I wouldn’t want that. It would totally neutralise the effectiveness of the internet, that is, it’s ability to disseminate unpopular information to people who would normally never have had access to it.

Also, with government mandated, server-level filtering, it means that the government can control what information is seen. As stated, filtering is not perfect, so no one would even think there was something insidious going on if, say, an opposition political site disappeared. People would just assume that the site has posted something with the wrong word on it and it would come back later. However if this happened in the lead up to an election, it could have a large impact on the outcome if certain information is not available.

I hope that the government can resist this policy, however I am concerned, as the government has suggested this idea before. However, the newthen Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Daryl Williams recently released a report on content on the internet and new ‘premium’ (read:adult) content on mobile phones. (Now offline, see Google Cache) In this report it is stated:

• That it is no more practical than it was at the commencement of the Online Content Scheme to use complex ‘analysis’ filtering technologies at the server level. Analysis filtering techniques are more practical in PC-based products;
• While technically possible, a requirement for ISPs to implement URL/IP based filtering at the server level would be excessively onerous and the performance of the filtering limited;
• Internet safety would be improved by more active promotion of filtering technologies by Australian ISPs. Options considered in the report include greater promotion of filtering to subscribers and/or requiring ISPs to provide filtering services on an ‘opt-out’ basis;

(Emphasis mine)

What we need is organisations like the IIA and the ACS, as well as the general public, to petition the government & Family First over this policy. Explain the damage it would do to our economy & our liberties. Point out the practical flaws in the system. People need to have these things explained to them.

The reason why this matters is that after the election last week, Family First has a very good chance of holding the balance of power in the senate, and this puts them in a very powerful negotiating position.