11 December 2008

Latest clean feed objections

Telstra has said they will not participate in the trials, arguing that it is unable to due to "customer management issues".Are they worried that customers used in the trial might sue them? I would. A child protection agency, Childwise, attacked this as a bad decision, but I think this is the "Somebody Think of the Children" motivation in play, not any considered judgement. Sage-Au, the sysadmin group pointed out the problems:

"How do you choose these participants? To make these trials really meaningful, it has to be done in a real-world environment with millions of internet users," Sage-Au president Donna Ashelford said.

"The bottom line is live ISP content filtering is simply not feasible."

There's also the question of legal liability and who would be held responsible if something went awry during the pilot.

Opposition communications spokesman, Nick Minchin and Greens spokesentity Scott Ludlam both attacked the vagueness and lack of failure criteria on a "live trial" that doesn't actually involve any users.

Australian PC writer William Maher notes that Telstra, the all-purpose evil demon in telecommunications in Australia, may have won some friends with this.

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