Managing Director Michael Malone, who has been stating throughout the entire process that they only agreed to participate in the trial to demonstrate just how flawed the idea is, had some interesting things to say…

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.

iiNet’s withdrawal means that the trial continues without any representation from the country’s three largest Internet Service Providers.

I wonder what will happen next with the comedy of errors affectionately known as the Great Aussie Firewall.

Currently being trialled by six of the country’s smaller internet service providers, the whole process has been nothing but a case of one piece of bad publicity after another.

Earlier this week, the hosting provider of the Whirlpool forum, BulletProof Networks, was threatened with an A$11,000 per day fine because just one of Whirlpool’s thousands of members posted a link to a website which is among those which would be banned should the filter be permanently implemented.

The great irony here is that the filter is being “sold” to Australia as a necessary evil to block sites that promote the sexual abuse of children. The link posted on Whirlpool was to an anti-abortion site that had been added to the blacklist because of just one complaint by just one person about just one page. See here and here for more.

It gets better. As a result of the above, Computerworld has discovered that it only takes just one person to add a site to the blacklist.

The decision is made by a single ACMA staffer, even someone part of a graduate process, who assumes the classification board would not like [a Web site].

The two types of content that ACMA can hide from the eyes of Australians are prohibited content, which has been previously classified; and potentially prohibited content which is banned on a hunch that the classification board won’t like it.

No committee review or consultation with a panel or “experts” – just one person who can decide based on his or her person feelings.

The current version of the blacklist has now been published on Wikileaks (you can find that one by using your search engine of choice), and that site has also been added to the blacklist, along with the official business website of a Dentist, and several other legitimate sites.

I’ve taken a look at the list, and based on the URLs alone, can safely say that no normal person should be looking at those sites anyway, but that’s not the point.

Censoring the internet is essentially a step backwards for Australia, a country that takes pride in its tradition of democratically electing governments. Not only that, but determining the blacklist on the decision of just one person reminds me of a certain other type of government that Australia frowns on.

19 March 2009 Update: Senator Conroy has released a statement both condemning the publication of the blacklist contents, and denying that the published list is the actual blacklist.