How Will the Government’s “Clean-Feed” Internet Affect Your Business?

Guest Contributor: Richard Giles

Imagine your phone didn’t work all the time. Imagine if you tried to call a local business and it wouldn’t connect. Or worse, someone tried to call your business and they couldn’t get through. You’d lose potential income right?

Well the Federal Government’s “Clean Feed” initiative could do exactly the same thing to web sites.

Labor is in the middle of testing how they can filter every Australian’s Internet connection, and if they have their way, you will have no choice. The plan is to filter the Internet for content that is deemed inappropriate for children, and for content prohibited by the ACMA.

However, because such a system is so complicated to implement, it will mean several things: it will filter innocent material some of the time for no reason, it will slow the Internet down for everyone, you won’t have a choice, and it will cost you more.

It is important to protect our youth, but not with a filter…
The Government said, “Labor considers that, just as we teach Australian children about the risks of drink driving, we must also teach them how to be responsible cyber-citizens and about the importance of cyber-safety.”

Which made me think of this example to explain filtering: It would be like having a breath testing unit (that isn’t completely accurate) on everyone’s street and everyone has to be tested before they can get on their way. It would stop drink driving to some degree, but there would still be false readings, it would slow everyone down, infringe our rights, and cost a lot of money and time.

What happens if your web site gets filtered, even for a day or so, because the filter technology accidentally added you to the black list? This is a definite possibility with the current technology and for a business – that can mean loss of business!

When the Government themselves did tests in June this year, their tests showed that on average 4% of innocuous sites were blocked. I think that’s a pretty significant number.

Filtering will slow the Internet down for everyone:
Again, back to the Government’s tests, which I should point out were not done in a real world environment and could result in much worse performance results because of the scale that will be required by ISPs. But, on average, the filters slowed the bandwidth of the test network down by 42%.

It infringes everyone’s freedom of speech:
The way the Government intends to filter the Internet is with two steps. The first is intended to protect children by filtering content the Government thinks they shouldn’t see. The second, is to filter content they think should be banned. Anyone of age can opt-out of the first step. Nobody can opt-out of the second.

That’s right, the Government is going to decide what we can and can’t see on the Internet, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

It will cost everyone more:
To start with, the cost of implementing the technology by ISPs will be huge. It will cost them in infrastructure, as well as man power. Those costs will be handed down to customers. Now think of the impact on you and your company if the Internet was 40% slower. What if you didn’t get some information because it was filtered incorrectly?

It’s already cost tax payers money, because I’m guessing the testing the Government did in June wasn’t free. It’s a $44.2 million policy. Money I can think of dozens of ways of putting to better use.

Overall the idea is ridiculous. It has so many flaws, and will have a significant impact on Australians in so many negative ways that any reasonable person will agree that it’s the wrong thing to do.

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