Australia’s Internet filtering too ambitious, doomed to fail
It's tough being a government these days; who has the energy to clean up the Internet after a hard day's work bailing out the financial sector? Not the Australian government, it seems. Rather than actually doing something about illegal content, they just make a list of it and tell ISPs to filter everything that's on the list. Sidestepping the murky political details and—for the moment—the civil liberties problems inherent in this approach, let's take a closer look at the technical aspects of such a plan.
In the Internet Service Provider Content Filtering Pilot Technical Testing Framework document, the Australian Government Department of Broadband Communications and the Digital Economy provides some details about what it wants ISPs to do in a pilot project. The main part is that ISPs who are interested in participating in the pilot will test solutions for filtering a list of at most 10,000 URLs on a blacklist maintained by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, a regulator not unlike the FCC. "Prohibited online content" includes what you would imagine, but also your garden variety porn (yes, the stuff they broadcast over the air on public TV in the Netherlands), and under special circumstances even R-rated movies. Filtering URLs on the ACMA blacklist is a mandatory part of the pilot, though additional filters that aren't clearly specified are optional.