Internet Industry Association

IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos has issued a call to all industry players likely to be affected by the Government's proposals on mandatory filtering.

While the Government invites ISPs to register for further particulars on their new responsibilities, the IIA has already received queries from several ISPs and other industry members on how the proposals may affect them.

"In view of the uncertainty within the industry, we are inviting industry participants both within and beyond the IIA membership to contact us with any issues and concerns. We will take these back to the Government for its response," Coroneos said.

Issues raised so far with the IIA include:

• Will the large penalty provisions and compliance risk increase my insurance premiums for contingent liabilities and what information about our operations, would an assessor need to set the rates?
• What estimates may be required for managing additional network capacity to handle peak loads? Enex TestLab's recommended that ISPs account for "very high traffic sites" like YouTube, which "could cause additional load on the filtering infrastructure and subsequent performance bottlenecks.
• To support peaks in traffic, vendors recommend allowing additional network capacity of approximately four times the estimated traffic at the filter." Is this a reasonable estimate?
• How do we respond to current account holders who challenge the policy and threaten to leave our service?
• How we do inform concerned families that the Government mandatory measures focus on legally classified RC material and cannot protect against other more obvious inappropriate R-rated material without relying on an additional family friendly filter? In other words, how do we overcome the possibility that families will develop a false sense of security given the limited aims of the program?
• One local social media player has asked what risks they need to manage if one of their users post RC material on their site. Will they risk their entire service being blocked?

HELP US TO HELP YOU

As the industry vacation break nears, the IIA will be seeking responses via a formal online questionnaire in early January. It will be accessible via our website and we'll not contact you any further unless you expressly request. In developing our more formal questionnaire, we'd appreciate receiving your suggestion of issues we should include and send them our communications to our coordinator’s address, emelia@iia.net.au.