The Department for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy have finally announced which ISPs will be graced with the privilege to take part in the censorship trial. The resulting list is nothing short of hilarious.
The chosen few are Primus Telecommunications, Tech 2U, Webshield, OMNIconnect, Netforce and Highway 1. Of these, Tech 2U is a completely nondescript ISP, Webshield already offers only filtered connections, OMNIconnect and Highway 1 are both targeted at businesses, and Netforce — wait, Netforce is an ISP? I can only find this page concerning Netforce’s ISP operation, and they too appear to be a business ISP. That leaves iPrimus, which already offers voluntary content filtering, as the only notable ISP involved for home users. Optus and iiNet, two of the largest ISPs in Australia and the largest known to have offered to participate, have been snubbed.
In other words, home users will be represented in this trial by two ISPs with a pro-filtering bias that already have the required content filtering infrastructure in place and one that is so small as to be essentially insignificant. The larger, far more significant ISPs that had offered to participate were excluded, probably because they have expressed concerns about the plan. I have little doubt that this trial will find ISP-level Internet censorship to be a resounding success, given that the DBCDE have cherry-picked the most biased and obscure ISPs possible. An evidence-based approach? Rubbish.
