Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s suggested in relation to the Federal Government’s controversial — and not popular here at Gizmodo — Internet filter that Optus and Telstra have implemented it. That’s not quite the whole story.
In Conroy’s speech, in reference to the filter he stated that
“Well, two companies, in fact three companies have already introduced it. It may come as a great surprise to you that the internet hasn’t slowed down or collapsed. Telstra and Optus and a small – apologies to the third company – have introduced the filter.”
As Delimiter points out, this isn’t exactly the whole story. Both Optus and Telstra and the smaller Internet provider, which in this case is CyberOne have implemented a filter, but it’s not the Federal Government’s controversial filter list that’s powering it; instead a smaller Interpol list of the ‘worst’ child pornography sites that have been blacklisted by Interpol.
It’s not entirely clear how many sites Interpol has blacklisted, but it’s believed to be less than a thousand. The Federal Government’s filter list contained well in excess of 1,000 sites back in 2009; possibly more than 2,000 at least, and presumably larger now. To be fair to Conroy, he did clarify later in the speech that it was the Interpol list that the companies were using, but that hasn’t stopped a number of media reports listing it as the ‘government filter‘.
[Delimiter]