The Australian government's plan to censor the entire Internet hit another major snag this week after two of the country's largest ISPs, Telstra and InterNode, announced they would not participate in the government's proposed filtering tests. Many of the ISPs in Australia, in fact, are either refusing to join the test, joining it only to prove it won't work (iiNet), or only testing a scaled-down version of what's intended to be the final model (Optus).

We've covered the numerous flaws in Australia's plan in some detail, and the ISPs are citing some of the same issues as reasons for why the plan won't work. At present, the government is planning a two-tier system. The first tier (compulsory for all Australians) would block all "illegal" material (as deemed such by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA). The content blacklist is not to exceed 10,000 URLs, but when the ISP Optus begins actually testing the first tier next year, it will be working with a cut-down list of 1,300 rather than the expanded list of 10,000.

The second tier of censorship filtering is meant to be an opt-out system that will block both the illegal content and "content deemed inappropriate for children." Said content will again be deemed appropriate or inappropriate by ACMA.

The government seems to be completely out of touch with the technological requirements and logistical flaws of its own plan. Filtering for just the first tier of this plan is problematic enough—clearly the ISPs think so—but filtering all Internet traffic for those on the second tier of the plan will consume a disproportionate amount of ISP resources for a small group of customers. Deep packet inspection (DPI for short) doesn't just require additional processing resources and expensive equipment, it creates latency problems that aren't easy to address. Adding more bandwidth to the the network, in this case, does nothing to increase performance and might actually retard it; more incoming packets means still more data that must be inspected and properly routed. Faster DPI equipment can theoretically speed the process, but the window in which such inspection can take place without impacting the end user's experience is small.

According to The Age, Communication Minister Stephen Conroy's office is long on rhetoric but a bit dicey on the actual facts. The minister himself has apparently written to critics and told them that the upcoming tests would be "live trials over a closed network test that will not involve actual customers," but has neglected to explain how one performs a live test without deploying the service to a group of customers. The government's plans are opposed by a coalition of non-majority Australian parties, the aforementioned ISPs, and anti-censorship protesters. The recent flurry of negative publicity surrounding the Internet Watch Foundation's decision to block Wikipedia based on a single image (since retracted) won't do anything to help the government's plan, either. To date, Senator Conroy maintains that the government's filtering system will use the same IWF blacklist as Britain, opening the country to the same sorts of filtration issues.

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