Last Friday, Dale Clapperton and Nicolas Suzor appeared on behalf of EFA to give evidence to the Commonwealth Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network. EFA had previously provided a written submission to the Senate, voicing concerns about the increased cost to users and the potential anti-competitive effects of the proposal.

The full text of the hearing is available on the Hansard Senate website (direct link to PDF).

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Electronic Frontiers Australa (EFA) today expressed concern about a lawsuit filed against Internet Service Provider iiNet in the Federal Court. A consortium of media companies have sued the ISP for allegedly allowing its users to download infringing movies and TV shows by failing to terminate their accounts after allegations of infringement by the copyright industry.

"This lawsuit is the latest attempt by the movie industry to bully Internet Service Providers into becoming copyright police," said EFA spokesperson Nicolas Suzor. "ISPs are not in a position to monitor and terminate internet access to users based upon unsubstantiated threats from copyright owners, and should not be asked to do so."
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Internet engineer Mark Newton has published a followup to his earlier letter and meeting with his MP, Government Frontbencher Kate Ellis. Many of our members and the public have written to their MPs about this issue and have been frustrated with the responses they have been getting, which are basically boilerplate containing the same misleading assertions they were complaining about in the first place.

EFA has been supportive of Mark's credible and well-reasoned activism against the filtering proposal, and his latest letter continues in this theme. He raises a point that has concerned us and many others, the still ambiguous nature of what is to go on the secret blacklist:

It is further interesting to note that the Minister has now added the term “unwanted” to his rhetoric, after having had it pointed out that the ACMA blacklist he keeps waving about is not actually a list of “illegal” material . I trust you will agree that his replacement term, “illegal and unwanted,” reinforces community concerns about the scope of the ALP’s proposal, especially given that the Minister has refused to clarify what, exactly, the new term means, and who gets to decide what is “unwanted.” 

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Filtering the blacklist

As the Government's plans for Internet filtering move forward, the new details we learn do little to dampen concerns about the scheme. The technical issues remain as acute as ever, but to many of us the implications for Government control of speech on the Internet are just as significant. Yet the Government has consistently (some would say monotonously) referred to stamping out child pornography when defending its scheme to the public, and to the Parliament.

This is hardly a goal anyone could object to, but it has always been a disingenuous representation of a plan that has been sold as a cyber-safety measure. Nobody seriously suggested that children were looking at child porn. But could the Government be sincere when it says it only wants to "enforce existing laws?"

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