Those of us against it are trying to cut through this nonsense and point to the bigger issues. Suppose that they were only out to block child pornography websites. The material is obviously bad. The material is obviously illegal. But it still does not make the filter the right policy because of the level of the trust we put in the Government not to abuse their power now and in the future. (And in reality they want to block "refused classification" material, which is a very fuzzy definition which definitely includes material which is legal to own.)

So can we trust the Government? My instinct says no. However there's nothing like the benefit of hindsight. Gizmodo has recently posted a short article about what's happened in Turkey since the introduction of their filter, including a 3-minute video report [youtube] from Al Jazeera about how badly the situation has devolved. Not only are all kinds of websites being blocked for political or religious reasons, but no progress is being made in the attempt to have the laws appealed.

Could it happen in Australia? You bet. You bet our civil rights on it.

EDIT: Another highly recommended article about the flaws of censorship in general:  The State of trust: it's a one way street

Right now Internet users are tending to solve the problem by delegating responsibility for their data to a third party who is supposed to keep it secure and supply it back to the user on request. This way you can upload data from one of your computers and download it (even automatically) on the others when you need it. For things like your files, email and contacts there are services available such as Dropbox, Apple's MobileMe and Canonical's Ubuntu One.

Some kinds of data are more sensitive than others. As a matter of policy I dislike making my data available to other parties unless it's necessary and I do it explicitly. It is well known amongst those who use email encryption that the encryption should be used all the time so as to not draw special attention when you do send something sensitive. This is also one example of keeping your data your own as a matter of course. Another advantage is that you use the same workflow all the time.

Suppose, as has happened before, I need to work with a digital copy of an art piece where all hell would break loose if it was leaked or shared. It would be downright stupid of me to upload it to somebody else's computers where I'm no longer directly responsible for the data. If I don't upload it, it can't leak, so the most sensible thing is not to do so. There's unlikely to be a problem even if I did use someone else's storage, but I don't want to take the risk. Now I need to start using special methods to move the data around such as an external hard drive or scp. How inconvenient. All I really want to do is to easily copy stuff over a network to the other computers without a middle man.

The trouble is it's a pain to set up that kind of service on the Internet right now. It won't really be viable on a large scale until IPv6 takes off in a big way. When that happens every device on the Internet will be individually addressable (and hopefully not excessively firewalled). Over the next couple of years this will become more and more attractive, particularly as the speed of Internet connections increases.

But why stop at ultra-sensitive data? Many of us store things like our email, instant messenger logs and social networking data on other people's computers. Google might even store your music and stream it to you. If we have a convenient method of synchronising our own data on our own computers we may as well do so and thereby eliminate the risks of losing direct control of the data. And we get an awesome backup system for free.

So we have this neat Diaspora thing coming out in a few months. It's going to provide decentralised peer-to-peer encrypted social networking. It'll hopefully be a little like Facebook with absolute control over to whom your data is given. I'm going to love playing with and possibly seriously using Diaspora but I doubt it will deliver enough convenience to steal many Facebook users, at least for a while.

I'm seeing something more here. The Diaspora devs explain that they want to make an extensible framework where anybody can create any sort of application or payload for sharing between peers. I reckon they're seeing a bigger picture where peer-to-peer is a necessary part of keeping our data private on the Internet. Initially, though, they're creating a secure social networking tool. That's a great idea because that's where users are hurting the most right now.

Diaspora or a project like it must succeed. I refuse to acknowledge a future of computing where users are expected to surrender data to others to get their work done on the Internet. It may not matter even most of the time. There is always a place for your own computer, your own data, your own control.

The cloud is getting more convenient all the time. With a little resourcefulness and work, peer-to-peer systems between our own computers can be convenient too. Then we won't have to throw out our old expectations of privacy for the sake of that convenience.

(John Gilmore famously once said, "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." However,) "The Net" is not some robot but the result of how everyone uses it.

Since the Internet is effectively a democracy in its own right, do you believe that any nation should have the right to impose regulations upon it? Could it have its own sovereignty?

On the broadcast the part in parentheses was omitted. As I watched the panellists attempt to answer the question (or dodge the question) I quickly realised that apart from Brett Solomon, the intent of my question was mostly missed. In hindsight I see that by trying to fit my question in a small number of words I obscured my meaning.

Nonetheless the word "sovereignty" in particular brought up some good discussion about how sacred the freedom to do what you like on the Internet is. An on-screen tweet also suggested that it was more like anarchy then democracy, citing /b/. This is a fair point but still not quite what I meant.

I would like to elaborate a little about what I did mean. I do not necessarily think that the following is true. It is more of an interesting thought experiment for me, which is why I attempted to pose it to the Q&A panel.

The Proposal

The Internet is evolving all the time and I consider this to be very much like a democratic process. I'm going to stretch this analogy a bit. Instead of a piece of land on which we live, we have a relatively boring network over which we can make connections between computers using generally the TCP/IP suite with IPv4 and IPv6.  There is a lot of complicated technology which makes it happen but fundamentally that's all we're getting. An empty block.

On one level standardisation is generally democratic. Most Internet standards are developed by working groups with input from the entire industry -- the community and the businesses which run and use the Internet. We have requests for comment, and draft and approved specifications. Best of all, these working groups are doing this work knowing that it has to meet the needs of the stakeholders. Their standard has to gain general acceptance. A political party's policy must also gain general acceptance for them to be elected. Otherwise we go and use a different standard or vote for a different party, or make our own.

Standards are mostly about the Internet at the level of those who implement it. On another level there is a form of democracy in what services Internet consumers choose to use. Lots of people use email. Lots of people use peer-to-peer services. Lots of people use web servers. Lots of people use Facebook. The services which have server and client software, those which are supported, are those which have gained widespread popularity. Nobody is forced to use any of them, but it is inefficient to work against the grain because you cannot communicate with others as easily. This process of being driven to accept what the majority wants is also a democratic feature of the Internet.

The major point where this analogy falls apart is that democratic governments in the physical world can outlaw certain activities. This is not enforceable on the Internet because whatever the "crimes" are, they can be obscured easily. You can't encrypt your stealing of a car, but if someone invented an invisibility cloak that would be a similar effect.

Yet by and large this global community of Internet users feels that the benefits of this freedom outweigh the disadvantages of not being able to outlaw activities. This is where John Gilmore's famous quote applies. He originally made the statement about USENET but he stands by it to this day in a more general sense too. If censorship is applied to the Internet users change which services they use; they change how they use the Internet and therefore its form and features in order to circumvent that censorship. By a process of consensus, users do not want the censorship to happen. If the majority of users wanted to embrace censorship or any other arbitrary restriction, the changes necessary to work around it would not gain traction. People would say, "Stuff Tor. Proxies for rent? Hah, they'll be out of business in no time." More people would block Tor users because they feel that the trouble caused through anonymity is not outweighed by the ability to circumvent censorship.

The Internet community is big. It has representatives in the form of users from every nation. It is a community which is saying in a more-or-less democratic way that Governmental censorship is unwanted.

In that context, who is the relatively small Australian Government to say, "We know better than the Internet community. We should apply blacklisting for RC content."?

It is not even a question of the technical implementation of the policy. It is a restriction upon the Internet community which has by majority decided that it does not want the restriction. But the Internet community is much larger than the Australian community or Government, so there may be an argument to say, "The Internet overrules the Australian Government. No filtering." If so, should national Governments of the physical world respect that?

In saying so it is not suggesting that anarchy should be permitted on the Internet either. Crimes on the Internet are generally crimes in the physical world too.  Let the nation which has sovereignty over the physical space in which the criminals reside and the crimes are taking place enforce the laws of that area. However, they must not disregard the wishes of the (larger therefore more important) Internet community in their enforcement.

Well Then

Am I crazy, onto something or simply logically invalid? I haven't yet decided. Given that the Internet is a shared global resource and medium I think we have to at least settle on the issues of what individual nations may or may not do before we can fully evaluate censorship or national law enforcement proposals.

I was a little disappointed and I had the feeling that some of the industry players in the room were too. There was a lot of feel-good fluff about how important ICT is in the Tasmanian economy and a lot of dedication to creating a new ministerial position to oversee ICT in the state. What was missing was specific detail about what they would like to see the technology actually do.

Premier David Bartlett's explanation for this was that he doesn't want to get too narrow-minded and would prefer to engage with the industry to see what they want to do. This is at the same time as today announcing $4.85M of investment in various aspects of the industry. It would be nice if he had a detailed plan for what he wants this money to achieve before he throws it at people.

Nonetheless he has some goals in mind and that is commendable: fifteen thousand jobs created within four years, wifi available at tourist towns and CBDs, investing in online delivery of health services and development of the so-called "smart grid", which is the use of distributed generators to supply and sell power efficiently. He is also putting money into tourism, agriculture and small business with the idea that they will use the money to develop cool uses for the NBN. Well, all sectors can use money. I hope they use it in a way that will give the state a return on its investment.

Will Hodgman, leader of the Liberals, managed to talk quite a lot without actually saying very much. I was amused by his statement that he is sure that health and human services and education can be assisted by the NBN in ways we haven't even contemplated yet. I may be in favour of the NBN but I at least have some definite applications in mind when I think, "Yes, this isn't such a bad way to spend a buttload of money."

About twenty minutes of his speaking can be summarised by:

• The ICT industry is important.
• A Liberal government will do everything possible to remove roadblocks for both small and big business trying to operate in Tasmania and communicate with the Government. (What those roadblocks are I still don't know.)
• They will set up an apolitical committee to choose the state's direction for technology.
• They will have an ICT minister supported by two officer underlings.
• They will invest heavily in education and health ICT services. Lots of investment.

He didn't even sound that excited about it. There's nothing more to say really; as far as I could see he didn't have anything to offer that Bartlett didn't.

Nick McKim, leader of the Greens, was fairly refreshing in that he wasn't as boring as the other two speakers. Full disclosure -- I vote Green -- but I think he approached today's forum with the most interesting information of any of the three speakers. That's orthogonal to the quality of the policy, by the way, but I learnt the most from him.

McKim spoke about having better e-commerce opportunities for business, better booking systems and making more available from our loungerooms, a point which Bartlett later seized. He would like to create a Broadband Innovation Centre in partnership with UTAS, similar to one in Melbourne, which would work with academia and other stakeholders and also work to identify the required skills for workers in the industry and ensure that suitable training is being offered. He spoke of the aging population in Tasmania as an opportunity to develop some excellent ICT technology to help elderly people live at home for longer, a theme which appears to be similar to Labor. He also recognises the importance of public access wifi, working to set it up on buses in Launceston.

More than the other two speakers I had some idea of what practical outcomes McKim wanted ordinary Tasmanians to get from the NBN. Possibly being a minority party means he doesn't get to say so much about investment, but his description was fairly limited on exactly how these things would be funded and managed.

Despite all the above I still don't think we have a clear political vision for what the NBN is going to achieve in this state. This was made abundantly clear by the first question from the floor. In far more words, it was essentially: "What are you actually going to do after the election?" As all three speakers had already wandered as close to answering that question as they were going to, it was taken as a statement and given no response.

I for one would like to know how the Minister for ICT (or whatever its title is, depending on the responsible party) will be chosen. I would also like our leaders to communicate with the industry and find out some exciting applications for the NBN before they start giving it money.

Here are a few other random ideas I have which I personally think would be valuable:

• Development of local high definition audiovisual streaming services which will be in high demand once the bandwidth is available
• Programmes to help old-school small businesses move to computerised and online accounting systems to reduce administrative overheads
• Making as much as possible from Service Tasmania and Centrelink available online
• Improving bandwidth in and out of state to make it more attractive for IT businesses to locate themselves here
• Use of the NBN unfettered by an ill-thought national ISP-level filter

I can't say I'm excited yet. At least my software updates will download really fast.

It has been shown clearly that appealing directly to the politicians responsible for the poor policy is not effective. We need to engage more with the general public, not only to raise awareness, but to make them realise how the filter could potentially affect them and show how futile it ultimately will be.

Enough Twitter. More Facebook? More real life, person-to-person interaction about this issue. "Hey, did you hear about that Internet filter? Dumb idea, huh? Hah, no, it won't help block child pornography..." You get the idea.

Protestors have succumbed to another problem -- factual inaccuracy. Nothing kills you faster in politics. In this article which Stephen Conroy wrote for Crikey he correctly blasts inaccurate reporting.

Keep up, people, we're no longer facing a heuristic filter which will cause massive slowdowns. Yes, the blacklist filter has only been trialed against 8 Mbit/s instead of 100 Mbit/s fibre, but pattern matching against 10000 URLs is not a large technological hurdle. ISPs can and will do that quickly in order to retain their competitive low-latency advantage.

It took them a couple of days, but nocleanfeed.com have updated their information page to reflect the most recent announcements, so that should be a good source of information. Furthermore, to encourage my own less technical friends to understand the issue I have developed my own more concise guide, The Australian Internet Filter And You, which I hope to use convince people that this filter is a bad idea. Please let me know if there are any factual errors in it; I would like to keep it up-to-date for as long as is required for this debate.

Go forth and spread the word amongst the people who wouldn't normally care! Goodness knows the media isn't doing it for us.