Clean Feed Self Regulation Model

As governments continue to control the Internet many advocate that Self Regulation is a better model for controlling the Internet. With the Australian Clean Feed  proposal almost ready to go to trial  and a loud out burst from civil libertarians   Steven Conroy is committed to see this through.

What about select regulation of the Internet? How does it work and and could it be used to control banned content from the Internet. ?

As most European Countries have a voluntary code with ISP filtering its is very much a self regulated model.  In the Australian Government report commissioned by the Howard government  and completed after the Rudd Government came to power It claims that the filters in Europe contain about 1800 entries blocking Child Pornography sites from around the world.(Internet Industry Association Feasibility Study - ISP Level Content Filtering,n.d)

  This is a very small database and if that what we are spending our money on then a data base with 1800 entries would certainly make very little difference to the performance of the Internet. One would say that you could support this proposal as it not a huge database and if it helps against this hideous industry of Child abuse then lets do it. But the idea has a much wider implications than these 1800 records. Suppose the government wanted to block  site that where not politically correct  or any one who spoke out against them such as the filtering system in china. In Australia and other free speaking countries would bring the Internet to stop.

Some European Countries filter Online Gambling site as well as Child Pornography Site. How many categories can filtering extend to.

The new issue has raised with Bit torrent filtering the the Australian Government wants to implement to combat  banned content.  Apparently this is feasible possible and I imagine through DNS filtering " Blocking the domain the content is coming from" to do this. Although bit torrent may be a method to access banned content there is still legitimate content available through bit torrents. The commercial world is using the technology to provide content to customers such as software vendors proving trail software. There is also the video market using Bit Torrent to distribute video trailer.  Restrictions on this technology will kill it and limit  us to high speed downloads.

Now you would have to imagine that there need to be some manual interception to completely stop the transmission of banned content. How do you manage compression files that  have been encrypted. How does filtering know the content of these files without the use of the encryption key to decode it. Well the only way is the do the same as the perpetrators of the this material do to intervene its it distribution. Lets face it this is what the filter is suppose to achieve or is there another agenda to it that has not been discovered.

So you would think in the end the money would be better spent on the Australian Federal Police to combat Internet crime.