Australian Study – ISP Level Filters Improved, but Insufficient for P2P

The timing couldn’t have been better. A new study coming out of Australia has concluded that content filtering technology has shown significant improvement, but couldn’t tell the difference between legal and illegal content over a file-sharing network.

In Britain, there is this distinct rush to implement mandatory content filtering whether ISPs want to or not. Many ISPs are quite reluctant to do so and, if this study, combined with the other studies conducted, are anything to go by, it’s not hard to see why.

The study (PDF) says the following:

ACMA considers that, under the conditions [a closed environment] created for the trial, the state of ISP-level filtering technology has significantly advanced, and stands in contrast with the state of this technology evidenced in the previous trial of filter products commissioned by NetAlert Ltd in 2005.

It’s a nice glowing review, but further down towards the end on page 51 shows something quite different:

The trial of the selected filter products against the scope criterion sought to identify the extent of the capability of ISP-level filtering products to recognise and block illegal and inappropriate internet content that is transmitted and delivered across the internet using non-web protocols (for example, instant messaging and file transfers), in addition to web content.

An evaluation of the scope of the internet filters fell outside the requirements of the previous trial. In the three years since the previous trial, however, analysis of global internet traffic indicate that non-web protocols – especially peer-to-peer traffic – contribute an increasing proportion of internet traffic.

All of the filter products have the ability to either block (turn off completely) or rate limit (slow down) a range of specific protocols. Some products offer control over a greater assortment of non-web content than others. None of the products have the ability to actively filter content transmitted using non-web protocols, except [two which were able to filter SMTP traffic - essentially e-mail - and one filter which was able to filter RTSP traffic]

This, of course, wasn’t the only study conducted on ISP-level filtering. Earlier this year, we reported on a study conducted by Internet Evolution which was also funded by the French record labels. Internet Evolution noted, “three vendors chose to exercise their right of veto because each of their results were – ummm… how to put this? – “not perfect” for various reasons.”

The study highlights that filtering technology was less than perfect. Once encryption was implemented on some of the protocols, some of the protocols fell off the filtering radar completely.

So where does this leave British ISPs being forced to filter their traffic? These two studies pretty much shows that the British ISPs are being forced to implement ineffective technology on their networks. Perhaps this could prove to be crucial information for the British government which is opening a public consultation on the matter.

(Hat tip: LawFont)