Net Neutrality: Are Content Filtering Practices being Actively Run by Large Australian ISP, Consumer Rights Left Un-Defended?

Posted on July 9th, 2008 by Drazen Drazic

Opinion Piece: By Wade Millican (with Drazen Drazic)

The recent content filtering issues we discussed pertaining to TPG are very concerning in their own right, but they are part of a much much bigger picture - something before the Senate of the United States.

They are part of a topic termed Net Neutrality. This is a battle taking place between the old-school traditional telco companies like ATT, MCI, Verizon, with the objective to make more money by re-charging for their Internet services. With the cost of bandwidth so cheap, there is supposedly no money in the market and thus they are all going broke?! In response, they are diversifying with service arms and branches but are also looking to re-coup costs on the leased lines. To do this, their goal is for content providers, such as Google (as but one example) to pay, to assure a certain quality of service to the end user’s PC. (Side note: This is a big issue when the line is provided all the way through with one provider, which is common both in the US and in Australia).

The content provider’s position and rightly so, is they are paying for open access, equal delivery and that they pay for the services that can handle this. They rightfully argue that they pay for their bandwidth when leasing the links/lines. You pay for a capped or uncapped service and a certain line speed. Your line speed becomes your cap anyhow. Most of the content providers would be paying some good dollars already and now the telcos are wanting to charge on top of that. A classic example of double billing or what?

It is going to be interesting to see how this pans out in the US Senate.

There’s a huge movement supporting the Googles and co. from people like Lawrence Lessig; (http://www.lessig.org/blog/) with his stance on Net Neturality. A video worth watching: http://www.lessig.org/blog/2008/04/testifying_fcc_stanford.html.

In Australia, we have organisations like the EFA (http://www.efa.org.au/) taking part, plus a huge underground movement supporting and believing in what’s right and displaying and fighting these issues together.

So it’s in this climate, in this space, that we need to ask what is happening at TPG with content filtering and degradation of service to end users. It’s illegal in the US and to my knowledge, it certainly isn’t legal over here in our system.

Is this an intentional testing of the limits? Does TPG think it can because this topic has not been talked about much in Australia and is not a well-known issue? It’s easy to blame the Internet itself or the content providers. This is clearly the case when there’s an active proxy in their own network that continues to work with the “desired” behaviour. Did someone “forgot” to patch the active proxy by chance….or on purpose, or just missed when they changed to the “new mentality” of screwing the ends of the pipe for their own pockets?

If you haven’t been following this topic, I encourage you all to understand the implications of it. In the end, somehow we’ll all pay - one way or another. Are the principles we believe the Internet is based upon slowly being killed off?

Wade Millican Sites: http://blog.wi.id.au/, http://wadem.id.au/