ACMA Trial shows filtering unworkable

The ACMA has released a report (PDF here) on their limited trial of filtering software. Not surprisingly, it has been hailed by Senator Conroy as a success and a blueprint for a pilot, and, eventually, the entire country.

If you haven't been keeping up with current events, yes, this means what you think it means. The Government wants to install filtering software, not onto the computer at your child's school, but onto the entire Internet. If your stomach just clenched up into a knot for a second there, that's good - it means you understood the absurdity of what they are trying to do.

Throughout this whole saga, it's been ambiguous, but assumed an ACMA blacklist of URLs was the most likely outcome. This was already an unworkable proposal, as there are simply too many web sites for a handful of bureaucrats to effectively police. But as for inspecting the content of every web request in real time, the issues are even more daunting. The technical headaches alone are frightening before one even considers the privacy and censorship ramifications.

The report itself helps to demonstrate why this is such a crazy idea. Even a casual reading of the executive summary should convince anyone that real-time content analysis is impractical at a national level. Firstly, the filters slow the network down even when they are not actively filtering. When they're switched on, they slow things down by about a third - two of the six products tested slowed the network by more than 75%! Secondly, the accuracy (as anyone who has ever been stuck behind one of these filters will know) is far from perfect. Between about 3% and 12% of "inappropriate" material wasn't blocked, and overblocking was of order a few percent. Even 1% overblocking means millions of legitimate websites on important and sensitive subjects would be blocked. (In fact, all the figures in the report's summary should be taken with a grain of salt, as the ACMA tested 6 products, then cherry-picked the best results from each of the metrics. You can't have the best performance - 2% slowdown - and still expect good accuracy.)

Nobody would pay for Internet access like this, and yet under this scheme, your bill would go up - filtering the entire Internet doesn't come cheap.

This situation is perfectly analagous to the Government legislating that the post office needs to start checking inside the envelopes for inappropriate material before sending them out for delivery. It's a whole different business than just routing letters based on postcodes, and would require a whole new staff. (Just ask the North Korean postal service). If you can imagine how such a situation might slow down mail delivery, then you can imagine why network performance would drastically degrade if content filtering was mandated by the Government.

Also, at the risk of stating the obvious, people of all ages use the Internet in Australia. Even if it were possible, an Internet made "safe" for a 13-year-old isn't going to be safe for a 7-year-old child. Nor is it going to be acceptable for a 30-year-old adult. Will the parent of the young child need to install extra filtering software at home to cover that extra gap? And what about their own web surfing? There is very little material that is not appropriate for anyone to see, and that stuff is already illegal.

Clearly, responsibility for control and supervision of a child's Internet use begins and ends with the parents. The Government, however, wants to decide what's appropriate for the average child and force it legislatively on the entire country. It's a one-size-fits-nobody solution.

For more information, Michael Meloni has an excellent overview of the ACMA's report at SomebodyThinkOfTheChildren here.