Amidst the seemingly endless complaints from the internet industry, communications minister Stephen Conroy has proceeded with plans for a live pilot trial of ISP based filtering and the report is now available here.

The pilot was conducted to evaluate the real world effect of the numbers and statistics garnered from the government’s closed trial earlier this year. The pilot is showed that URL blacklisting was 100% accurate, and did not affect performance.  The dynamic filter results ranged from 78.8% to 84.6% of 'unwanted' material successfully filtered, and only between 2.4% and 3.7% of 'wanted' material accidentally blocked.  These pilot results are described in the report: "The majority of these filtering technologies, when correctly installed, enable the filtering of additional content with minimal or no performance impact."

Read a recent Government report detailing the results and the filtering plan here.

The filter explained

A common misconception is that the government's filter plan is designed to 'stop cyber crime and abuse'.  This is obviously not the case; however, other aspects of the government cyber-safety plan will help 'stop crime'.  For example, the funding of 91 Australian Federal Police to the Child Protection Operations Team.  The filter on the other hand is preventative, to avoid 'accidents', and to fulfil a duty of care to children and adults who expect the government to control (RC) content from being proliferating in Australia. However, children or adults who are determined, skilled or resourceful will surely find ways 'around the pool fence', but this is no justification for not installing a ISP level blacklist, but does challenge parents, the internet industry and government to consider how we can better combat online illegal content.

The internet industry has been very active in expressing their opposition to the Government's proposal, from ISP representatives and civil rights bloggers to technology commentators in the papers. However, there has been little detail in their criticisms of the technology available. Service providers make their money from the amount of download, and the most lucrative part of downloading is arguably pornography images and videos.  You can view Senator Conroy defending the government plan on ABC's Q and A and SBS insight program.

The technology on offer is ground-breaking. Initial laboratory trials initiated by the Communications Minister have been promising. The latter trials found that the best filters blocked only 3 per cent of sites that were legitimate, slowed the internet by 2.85 per cent and, depending on the filtering system, was 80-95 per cent accurate in blocking unwanted content. Just how effective the technology will be will now depend on the field trials. But that isn’t stopping the internet industry from launching a major campaign against mandatory filtering, before the field trials have been conducted.