Just my pondering for the night.

Myself, as very much a technical person, practical solutions to the core. With current filtering technologies, any automated filter is pretty much a shotgun with its accuracy. When using a shotgun you get a spread, sometimes if that target you’re aiming at is close to something else you don’t want to hit – there’s a good risk you might hit that unwanted target anyway.

Therein lies the reason how filtering can used as a breach into freedom of expression, as well as a poor method of attacking ‘unwanted’ content.

Intentional or not, certain people and groups play politics – which may eventually be abused to edge the filtering system into the realm of suppression of information. If not, it’ll at least make the thought of mistakenly blocked content more palatable, making us more accepting as the filtering eventually works its way deeper and deeper into the content of the internet.

Technically as the filter list gets larger and more dynamic. The requirements for the filtering system become larger – most likely not just linearly, potentially exponentially. As do the costs, and for the ISPs that have to provide the system, passing those costs back onto us – the customers – quite a substantial increase in internet costs. Inherently as network response times increase, hardware costs will increase to rectify the situation.

The government won’t be able to help as each ISP is unique in its own way, and custom solutions cost more. I’m sure lesser ISPs will begin to fail providing filtering and not provide any internet at all to their paying customers – who by now will have already begun to shoulder quite a hefty burden of the filtering.

In these times of economic uncertainty and desperation – adding extra baseline costs to companies and businesses who pass costs onto consumers can’t be a good thing. Increased baselines costs can’t be a good thing for international trade, why bother with a country’s industry that is so hampered by risks and additional costs lumped on by an Internet filter intended to protect the country’s children.

Children who by this time on their slowed down, unreasonably more expensive Internet because the NBN also did not properly address future communications requirements, have already learned to bypass the filtering system that was deemed necessary to protect them while they send their self-shot nude photos to some lacking in life adult across the world via IM/Social networking from their government funded laptop.

All the while their parents are in the next room enjoying their newly acquired Digital HD TV bought with child support bonuses just in time for analogue tv transmission to be turned off.

While at this moment the Government has only pledged about $15M for the bushfire recovery funds, although government is happy to spend $128M on this internet filtering shenanigans.

Every night I confuse myself with how mandatory ISP level filtering could actually be considered at any level as being beneficial for our country’s future.