Can we drop this silly filter nonsense and move on?
Friday, December 26th, 2008Open letter to Minister Stephen Conroy regarding the proposed internet filter.
Over the last year, we’ve heard a number of people step up, complaining about this proposal, and what it will mean in terms of freedom-of-speech, and internet speeds. I also heard a rumour that mentioned the blocking of peer-to-peer traffic.
Now, it is very noble of the government to be that concirned with the issues involving pornography and other objectionable material, that they are pushing forward with developing and introducing this filter to the masses. Others have already pointed out many of the ethical and technical issues with the proposal, which I note, to date, are still not addressed.
The latest proposal however, has been to block peer-to-peer traffic. I strongly urge those in the government to carefully consider the consequences before taking on such a drastic action. Ignoring the fact that Bit-Torrent and similar protocols can, and are, used for legal purposes (such as distribution of open source software) as well as for piracy… a lot of other peer-to-peer protocols exist, that many people expect to be able to use freely.
Consider the following applications/protocols:
- Skype
- MSN Messenger
- Ekiga
- Yahoo! Messenger
- TeamSpeak
- EchoLink
- IRLP
- IRC DCC
- VNC
- RDP
- SIP (most VoIP systems)
- Hamachi
- … etc
All of these, rely on peer-to-peer traffic to operate, and are used lawfully. Blocking SIP could be disasterous to our telecommunications, since many people rely on this protocol as their primary home phone service! Such a move could proove highly unpopular with the voting public, and deadly to businesses that rely on VoIP services. In a time of global economic crisis, is this really what you want?!
It is true that many of us absolutely hate it, when a politician breaks an election promise. However, we are more than too happy to forgive politicians for breaking such promises, when such promises are mearly implementing bad policy. I urge this government to consider the above, in addition to the comments made by others on this topic, before going ahead with such disasterous propositions.