Here’s Telstra’s response to Conroy’s ultimatum for separation:

Telstra remains committed to working with Federal Government
September 15 2009 – Telstra Chief Executive Officer David Thodey today responded to the Federal Government’s proposed regulatory reform package.

“While we are disappointed the government has felt it necessary to introduce this legislation, Telstra remains committed to working with the government to find a solution that is in the best interests of the industry, the nation, Telstra and our shareholders,” Mr Thodey said.

“It is Telstra’s view that many aspects of this package are unnecessary and need never be implemented if a mutually acceptable outcome can be reached on the National Broadband Network.

“Telstra supports the Government’s NBN vision. We are willing to discuss options around separation.”

Telstra will carefully examine the package over the coming days, he said.

“At all times, our approach to regulatory reform and the NBN will continue to be driven first and foremost by the need to protect the interests of our shareholders,” Mr Thodey said.

The NBN has been given the strongest possible board and management focus, including the establishment of a dedicated Board sub-committee, chaired by the Chairman of the Board, Ms Catherine Livingstone, and an NBN engagement team, led by Group Managing Director Mr Geoff Booth.

Telstra has done a large amount of work to ensure we have the best possible understanding of the complex and challenging issues around separation and NBN.

“We are actively and constructively engaged with Government.” Mr Thodey said. “Much remains uncertain, but we will continue to provide updates whenever it is appropriate to do so.”

Naturally, Optus weighed in on the discussion:

Optus welcomes landmark decision on regulatory reform
Optus today welcomed the landmark decision by the Federal Government to reform the regulatory environment governing the Australian telecommunications sector.

“The Federal Government today made an important step in reforming the telecommunications sector with its proposed changes to the regulatory regime. It is a landmark decision that has the potential to change the entire telecommunications landscape forever, resulting in considerable benefits for all Australians,” Paul O’Sullivan, Optus Chief Executive said.

The Government’s draft legislation closely mirrors the model Optus put forward in its submission to the Government’s regulatory reform discussion paper on 3 June 2009. Optus has long advocated for a regulatory framework built around four key pillars including: structural separation; open access principles; cost-based pricing; and ACCC oversight.

Maha Krishnapillai, Optus Director Government and Corporate Affairs said, “We are encouraged by today’s announcement and believe that the proposed reforms will address many of the issues which have adversely impacted competition in the Australian telecommunications industry over the last 12 years. We look forward to examining the draft legislation in further detail over the coming weeks.”

“The Government has made its intentions clear. It is now up to the parliament, Telstra and the rest of the industry to ensure this long overdue reform becomes a reality,” Mr. O’Sullivan said.

As did iiNet:

iiNet Welcomes Telecommunications Regulatory Reform

15 September 2009 – iiNet, Australia’s third largest Internet Service Provider (ISP), has welcomed the Federal Government’s planned reforms to telecommunications regulations saying it will encourage competition and benefit customers.

While still examining the full detail of the reforms, iiNet’s Managing Director, Michael Malone, said requiring Telstra to separate and streamlining the competition regime were critical to the future of Australia’s telecommunications industry.

“The big winner from these reforms is the Australian consumer who will be able to gain access to fast, affordable and competitive broadband services,” Mr Malone said.

“It should provide greater certainty for the telecommunications industry and encourage investment, innovation and jobs.

“iiNet is well placed to continue our strong growth under the new world that will be created by the National Broadband Network and these regulatory reforms.

“We are a market leader in product innovation, customer service, content provision, backed by a strong brand, and will be able to compete on a truly open high speed network.”

So the question now is whether anybody cares? We probably won’t actually see any pricing reforms for a while yet, and while it’s always nice to see Telstra slapped around a bit (especially after the arrogant way Trujillo ran the company), what we really want to see is cheaper broadband (and ADSL2+ at my local exchange for ISPs that aren’t Telstra)…

[Conroy vs Telstra on Giz]

Apparently the government and Telstra have been talking about this for awhile, so it shouldn’t have come as a big surprise to the company. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t fight it. Considering how much friction there has been between the company and the government over the past few years, you’d expect a confrontation.

Here are some of the restrictions Conroy announced this morning:

If Telstra don’t play along and do thins voluntarily, the Government will change the Telecommunications Act 1997 so that:

* Telstra conduct its network operations and wholesale functions at arm’s length from the rest of Telstra;
* Telstra provides equivalent price and non-price terms to its retail business and non-Telstra wholesale customers; and
* this equivalence of treatment is made transparent to the regulator and competitors via strong internal governance structures.

Furthermore, the Government will prohibit the company from gaining any additional spectrum for advanced wireless broadband while:

* remains vertically integrated; and
* owns a hybrid fibre coaxial cable network; and
* maintains its interest in Foxtel.

Discussions will need to be completed by December at the latest, with the Bill set to be voted on in October or November. Which gives us a couple of months of entertainment at least. Let’s just hope the consumer – who Conroy claims will benefit most from this – actually does see the benefit.

[DBCDE]

The research, which will almost certainly be used by Conroy and his pals to try and reinforce their argument for mandatory internet filtering, also states that two thirds of teenage girls surveyed have viewed porn online as well.

Even though the internet wasn’t anywhere near as prevalent when I was a teenage boy, I can say without a trace of doubt that any teenage boy saying they’d only seen porn online accidentally is lying. Because it’s completely natural for teenagers to be curious about the physical and hormonal changes in their body, and porn offers a fairly easy way to explore and understand those changes, even if it isn’t necessarily the best way.

I can’t speak for women here—never having been one—but I imagine it’s the same across the estrogen fence.

Let’s just hope that somehow the end result of this study is better parenting, rather than the government deciding they’ll try and “fix” the problem themselves…

[News.com.au]

Highlighting the stupidity of the current lack of an R18+ rating for games is the fact that even though games can only be rated to MA15+, pages on the internet itself can be rated R18+.

According to the SMH piece, the filter will block sites selling or hosting games that are RC (which is anything above our MA15+) based on a complaints system to the ACMA. The scary part is that this could mean sites like Amazon, which sell games restricted to adult purchase in the US, but might be RC here in Australia, could be blocked. It also puts question marks over online games like World of Warcraft and Second Life.

As always, you should feel outraged by the Government’s plans to filter the internet. Rather than being a tool to fight child pornography, this is quickly becoming an Orwellian crusade to control the freedoms of Australians everywhere. Make sure the government hears your voice denouncing their plans – it’s the only way we can hope to overcome this idiocy.

[SMH]

So our advice: opt out, opt out, opt out. Despite Optus stating that they want to play a proactive role in the trial to measure the impact of filtering technologies, the truth is that filtering trials have already been done before and told us that these technologies DO have a negative impact on performance. Not to mention the simple fact that, as any real anti-virus software company will tell you, filtering through a blacklist isn’t an effective way to stop access to internet nasties.

Anyway, I’m just happy I’m not an Optus internet customer today…

“The trial is to establish what is possible” Senator Conroy began, before going on to explain that there have been previous, much publicised trials conducted by previous governments which had shown that software could slow the internet down between 3 and 87 per cent. Of course we already knew this, although the Senator made no effort to mention that even though this trial was completed a couple of years ago, the most effective filters impacted performance the most, while the 3% slow-down filter let stuff through like ping pong balls through a basketball net.

Still, technology has improved significantly since the last trial (apparently), so the government is “not afraid to have a trial to find out” to see if its progressed sufficiently. They will then be “guided by the trial”. The problem with this is the quality of information received from the trial – considering the participating ISPs (with the exception of iPrimus) aren’t exactly major players, and the fact that iPrimus was leaving the option to volunteer for the trial up to its members, the results you can expect will be questionable at best and misleading at worst.

Next, Conroy moved onto the issue of what will be blocked, and the issue of the leaked ACMA blacklist on Wikileaks. “The blacklist has existed for nine years”, the Senator said. A few times. “And” he continued, with a wave of his hands and a growing air of confidence, “it hasn’t destroyed the net; it hasn’t caused mass panic.” Someone should tell him that’s because we can still access the sites on the list. Not that we condone or suggest that we ever want to visit a child porn or pro-rape site, but any site that happens to be incorrectly placed on the blacklist (like Wikileaks, perhaps?) is still accessible, so it’s not an issue that effects our browsing experience.

But that’s when things started to venture away from normality and into the absurd.

“Now I’d like to talk about the dentist, ‘cos that’s be agood lot of fun this week. Here’s what happened… The Russian Mob”…

WTF? The Russian Mob? Okay Conroy, you piqued my interest. Continue…

“…targeted Queensland small businesses last year. What they did was identify websites that had blank pages underneath the main page. And what they would do, they’d put some material that would be refused classification on that site, on that one page within that site. Then they spam all the people who’d be interested in looking at this material. And we were advised by international agencies that this was what was happening. And so it was blocked internationally – it was never blocked in Australia. And then, it went away.

…. And to give you an example of the sort of success that they can have, they targeted a while ago, the Czech astronomy services. And within an hour or two of them sending out their spam, 12 million people had accessed vile child porn, that was attached to the Czech astronomy site”

The problem here is that because the blacklist is supposed to be kept secret – that there’s no transparency in the process as to what content will be blacklisted, this means that any victim of this sort of attack will essentially lose their website and any associated business because they’ll have no idea why people can’t access their site. Not only that, but there’s no way to ensure that these kinds of attacks are filtered – if the site’s not on the blacklist, then people will still be able to access it, and by the time the Government, or the ACMA or the classifications board has noticed and added the site, the damage will have already been done.

And if the Russian mob didn’t do it for you, Conroy’s response to Tony Jones’ question about Asher Moses’ story in the SMH yesterday that artist Bill Henson was on the leaked blacklist will blow your mind:

“The classification board looked at this website, and actually said ‘It’s PG’ and a technical error inside ACMA, I’m advised…” (derisive laughter from the audience) “Literally, a technical error, included it. But it was actually cleared by the classification board, so it shouldn’t have been on the list. Now I’ve asked ACMA in the last few hours to go through their entire list again to see if there’s any other examples of this. And at this stage – and they’re plowing their way through it overnight – they found this one site that falls in this category where it’s been misclassified – not by the classification board, but by the ACMA technology that they’ve been doing.”

So, a technical error, hey? Good thing it was picked up then. Imagine if Wikileaks had never published that list so we could discover for ourselves that there are sites perfectly safe for children being blacklisted, and potentially blocked if you introduce the mandatory filter.

Next up was the possibility of the filter and blacklist being used to block politial content, with some talk about Jihad (although sadly not a Jihad against the filter itself). Enter Mr Conroy:

“The Broadcast Services Act, under which the blacklist works, has got nothing to do with political content. You would have to change the Act. Now even my harshest critics are suggesting we’re trying to change the Act. What they say is ‘Ooh, we’re worried about might happen in the future’, but there’s no suggestion, there has never been a suggestion and there will never be a suggestion from a Labor government that we’re going to look at banning political material… Attempts to suggest that what we have been talking about are about political content are simply misleading.”

You can’t know what’s going to happen in the future Senator, but by introducing a filter you are setting a very dangerous platform for someone without your ideals to begin censoring political material in the future, whether the Act says so or not. The truth is that because the list is secret, we’ll never know, and that is reprehensible. Hell, let’s just reignite the cold war and get some communist scaremongering (or Islamic scaremongering these days, I suppose) and see what happens.

It sort of dragged on a bit after that, but worth noting is that Senator Conroy is driving for the classifications board to take control of the blacklist to keep RC material consistent across all forms of media. Of course, that would exclude video games at the moment, but that’s an issue that wasn’t discussed and so we won’t go into it here.

The one good element that Conroy did announce was that the Federal Police did crack a P2P child pornography ring in Queensland earlier this week. Sure, it had nothing to do with the filter, but it’s the only reassuring element to come out of the program from the Senator.

It’s mind boggling just how the stubborn the Government is being on this issue. our only real hope is that the technical trials will fail. Hopefully then the money and resources the Government is putting into the filter can be redirected to trying to capture the bastards perpetrating the criminal acts, rather than trying to protect the majority from something that will never cross their path online while setting a platform to control political opinion on the web.

If you missed the show, you can watch it on iView, or check it out here.

iiNet Withdraws from Federal Internet Filtering Trial

23 March 2009 – iiNet, Australia’s third largest Internet Service Provider, has advised the Federal Government that it is withdrawing from the proposed internet filtering trial.

iiNet’s Managing Director, Michael Malone, says they only agreed to participate in the trial to demonstrate that the policy was fundamentally flawed, a waste of taxpayers’ money and would not work.

Mr Malone said after drawn-out negotiations with the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (DBCDE), it was clear that an agreement could not be reached.

He cites constant changes in the policy, confused explanations of the purpose of the trial and recent revelations regarding the “blacklist” as clear indications that the trial is unnecessary.

“We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship,” says Mr. Malone.

“It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as “unwanted material” without an explanation of what that includes.

“Everyone is repulsed by, and opposed to, child pornography but this trial and policy is not the solution or even about that.

“In reality, the vast majority of online child pornography activity does not appear on public websites but is distributed over peer-to-peer networks which are not and cannot be captured by this trial or policy.”

Mr Malone said the Government should re-think its approach and urgently needs to make clear what its intentions are in respect of internet censorship, this lack of communication from government and bureaucracy is rightly seen as underhand and unsavory and is now attracting international dismay as well as Australian disgust.

Sadly, the truth looks like Senator Conroy and his fellow politicians are so blinded by their tagline “Keep kids safe” that they refuse to follow logic, reason, or common sense. It’s a scary, scary thought.

[iiNet]

No idea from which back corner of the web this internet meme has come from, but it worked for Watchmen, so it will almost definitely work for the proposed ISP internet filtering scheme that the Rudd government keeps pushing.If you use your imagination and imagine that it is a true representation of the current argument with the Government, then ultimately we can assume that the Allied forces (against filtering) will be victorious over Hitler and his cronies.

Also, I wonder how long it will take before someone mashes up this clip with the R18+ rating for games debate?

[YouTube - Thanks Kaan!]

[Q&A - thanks Jordan!]