The potential effects of being blacklisted

12 January, 2010

• no clean feed

Letitia Power

Category: General Business

There has been a lot of concern by Australians over the proposed Internet filter. If proposed legislation is implemented, Australian internet users will find themselves part of a two-tier system.

The first tier, which will be mandatory for all Australians, will involve a government-controlled blacklist of prohibited sites that ISPs must block. The second tier, which Australians may opt-out of, involves a more aggressive filter that is to remove all material “inappropriate” for children.

Frontier, one of the main leaders opposed to the internet filtering scheme, has released a fact sheet that outlines the flaws in the proposition.

Mistaken identity

Our main concern with the blacklist concept is the affects a dynamic filter could have on websites that are mistaken as containing 'inappropriate material'. For example, who will compensate a business when their website becomes blacklisted?

"Dynamic filtering is inherently unreliable as technological measures are inferior to human judgement; for example, educational sexual health resources are often inappropriately blocked by dynamic filters." - Frontier

In response to the debate over blacklisting websites Senator Conroy released a discussion paper on additional measures to improve the accountability and transparency of processes that lead to sites being placed on the blacklist.

Government's proposed blacklist methods and processes

The discussion paper mentions methods to block websites as: displaying a blocking notification and appeal mechanism, a review of the website by an independent expert and report to the Minister and Parliament and also a review by an industry group of RC content list classification processes.

Each of these processes mentioned in the discussion paper seem quite time consuming and expensive with businesses subjected to lengthy procedures to put their website back online.

Amongst things, last year the ACMA's blacklist was leaked, which lead to further doubts being raised in the online community over whether such a list, and even web filtering itself, can successfully achieve the federal government's goal of protecting Australians from undesirable content.

So how would your business sustain itself in a digitally censored age?

Do you agree with the federal government's proposal, if so why?

Personally I believe that such money could be spent on other methods that could be more affective in the fight against inappropriate content on the web.