Australia's current centre-left Labor Party, lauded by many for their 2007 decision to scrap the previous government's plans for a national ID card, is now raising the ire of civil liberty groups across the globe with a new AU$125 million 'Plan for Cyber-Safety.' Similar to the UK's child-pornography filtering system, 'Cleanfeed,' Australia's proposed infrastructure will block any content deemed by the government to be 'inappropriate for children'; that is, pornography of all stripes. However, instead of being 'opt-in,' Australians who don't want their connection filtered will merely be placed on a different filtering system and will be unable to view what the government describes as 'illegal material.' This has angered many Internet libertarians and citizens' groups, as well as Australian ISPs.
Pundits claim that between the unusual lack of Australian mass media coverage and the policy's unclear wording, consumers do not realize that opting out doesn't remove all censorship of their Internet connections. The policy's opponents have also raised concerns about the generally-accepted statistic that 1% of websites blocked by modern filters are blocked accidentally, and the possibility of expanding the filtering software's mandate in future to censor material such as political protest or drug-related websites. Still others oppose the idea for political reasons, believing the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy, is championing the technology to placate the Family First Party and other right-wing Australian organizations who supported similar moves by the previous Conservative government.
From a technical standpoint, excecuting the proposed plan might be difficult. Australian Internet Service Providers don't want to have to implement it, believing it too costly, too difficult to implement and technologically unfeasable. "All existing reports into Internet content filtering have said it is economically disastrous and impossible to control," said Michael Meloni, Australian web production manager and author of netalarmed.com, a parody website attacking the 'Plan for Cyber-Safety.' Despite this, according to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, the government will initiate trials of the technology and develop their policy based on the results.
nocleanfeed.com, a website maintained by Electronic Frontiers Australia which outlines the plan's holes, notes that the previous Conservative government comissioned studies which revealed the economic unfeasability of ISP-level content filtering. Additionally, the website points to another governmental study which admits such a system would result in a slowdown, "[ranging] from 18% through to 78%," of current, unfiltered speed.
As services like AOL's 'keyword' system or CompuServe's WOW! proved in the 90s, content-filtering solutions - especially automated ones - are incredibly error-prone and not well recieved by consumers. Worse yet, even modern filters, such as those employed by the Toronto District School Board, are easily bypassed by those fairly well versed in computer use.
Even old hands at Internet censorship, such as China and Pakistan, have historically had problems dealing with censoring the Internet. A Pakistani ISP, under government mandate, attempted to block YouTube after a trailer for a Dutch anti-Islamic film was uploaded, involving redirecting any requests from its customers for YouTube's IP to an ISP-controlled '404 page.' However, this reroute was accidentally sent upstream to the ISP's service provider, which accepted the change in IP mapping without examining it and proliferated it to other ISPs worldwide. Which, of course, resulted an entire planet's worth of requests to YouTube's IP being sent to one tiny Pakistani ISP. China's extensive blacklists and redirects are daily swamped by the profusion of media websites and procedurally generated pages. Either country's filters can easily be bypassed by anonymizer programs such as TOR, and Australia's setup will be no exception.