Transcript: Conroy explains his net censorship regime

Ben Grubb:
If people can't access these web sites to begin with, why not publish the list?

Senator Conroy:
Because they can at the moment.

Ben Grubb:
How can they?

Senator Conroy:
Because in Australian - they're not hosted - there's a difference between accessed and hosted.

They are not hosted in Australia because they can't be.

Ben Grubb:
But what I mean is, when your filter is in place if you pwere to publish those URLs people wouldn't be able to access them because they would be censored or blocked.

Senator Conroy:
That's a fair point but we don't think by putting the list up and inviting people to go and have a look and...

Ben Grubb:
But they won't be able to?

Senator Conroy:
Look, we're not suggesting for a moment that this is a foolproof guaranteed way to stop access to child pornography.

Nobody is suggesting that.

I've repeatedly stated this it is not a silver-bullet.

We need education programs, we need education for kids, for parents [and] for school teachers.

We need more research in this area.
 
We need more police in this area.

And we have put 125[.8] million dollars towards all of those things including the filter.

Obviously the filter has taken the majority of the publicity but this is a modest part of a larger package.

And as I said at the beginning of the discussion, this is material that is illegal in Australia today.

You can't go into a library, you can't go into a news agent, you can't buy it in a book store, you can't buy it at a DVD store, you can't watch it on telly and you can't watch it at the cinema and it is not hosted today on Australian ISP's servers.

Ben Grubb:
If we could just get to the live pilot because there were two tests that Enex conducted...

Senator Conroy:
There were a number of tests.

Ben Grubb:
Exactly.

Now the test - the live pilot - that was tested on the nine ISPs - they only tested speeds of eight megabits per second.

Now, as I understand it, that was the fastest speeds they could offer.

If other ISPs had decided [to participate in the test] they [Enex] may have been able to test up to 100 megabits per second...

Senator Conroy:
My understanding is this is scalable.

But again, there are those who are trying to suggest, and these are the same people, the same people who said it couldn't be done; that it would slow the internet down and they were wrong last time.

Telstra did an independent test independent of Enex.

And what they found was that you can block up to 10,000 URL addresses with no over-blocking, no under-blocking, 100 percent successfully and the impact on net speed was, and this is using Telstra's words, 'one seventieth of the blink of an eye'.

For those who have failed to prove their case.

And more importantly some of these individuals knew this wasn't the case when they made their claims the first time.

They are now trying to back track, they are now trying to say 'oh the test was flawed, it didn't look at this, it didn't look at that speed'.

This is scalable and there is no argument that it is scalable.

Ben Grubb:
Is there evidence that shows 100 megabits per second in the Enex TestLab [report] that it is scalable?

Senator Conroy:
We have spoken to Enex and we are confident that this is scalable.

Ben Grubb:
You were saying that Telstra were able to test 10,000 URLs, what I would like to know is: Is there going to be like a cap on the amount of URLs that can be on the refused classification list?

Senator Conroy:
We said from day one we would be evidence-based.

And again, what a number of people have been deliberately misleading about is they're looking at the Enex report and saying 'how can Conroy say it's 100 percent, the Enex report shows there is slowing down in a whole range of areas'.

That is if you do the extra optional filtering [where] there begins to be degradation.

So that is why we haven't made that mandatory.

We said that is an option.

Ben Grubb:
With [regards to] the extra additional optional list that ISPs aren't required to add, which is the one which ISPs can apply to grant funding [to block] - If this is about protecting children, why aren't you making it mandatory for people [ISPs] to offer it as an optional service; that additional list?

Senator Conroy:
Because we said from day one we would be evidence-based.

And we said that if it showed substantial depredating of the internet in a mandatory sense then we wouldn't go down that path.

And again what the tests show and Telstra has looked at this a fair bit, was that if the list exceeded 10,000 [URLs] you could begin to encounter a degradation of some significance.

Ben Grubb:
So you would never allow for degradation to occur?

Senator Conroy:
As I've said: it's one seventieth of the blink of an eye.

Now, if the list started to approach 10,000 [URLs] at some stage in the future then we would have to consider how we handled that and we would probably have to have a technical study.

But filtering technology advances like everything else on the net advances.

I mean that has been one of the really frustrating parts about this debate.

Everyone has tried to claim that a test that was done in 2005 meant you could not do something today.

Now, if we took that view on all the technology involved on the net and said 'well that's as far as we're going to advance the technology' then we wouldn't have this incredible, educational and socially advancing tools that is the internet.

So we wouldn't want to go past 10,000 [URLs] unless it was possible to do without the degradation.

So if it reached that point at some stage in the future then any government would then have to undertake further testing to ensure that we didn't get the degradation.

But let me be really clear about this: For those people who have tried to claim for the last year that there was an 85 or 87 percent slowing in the net by having a filter they have been exposed as frauds.

So, organisations that have run campaigns, circulated petitions, advertising that there is going to be an 87 percent degradation in speed on the net are frauds.

And they have been exposed and they are scrambling to try and find new arguments at the moment.