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Content needs regulation

By Staff Reporter, ITWeb
Johannesburg, 26 Aug 2008

The Internet has developed in an anarchic way since it escaped from ARPANET, with much of the growth driven by the intermediaries that deliver broadband Internet services as well as the applications that take advantage of high-speed Internet access.

These are the words of Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association (IIA) of Australia.

"Search engines, social networking sites and Internet Access Providers (IAPs) are all helping to fuel the growth of the Internet around the world. Collectively, these Internet service providers (ISPs) have one thing in common: they have limited control over what their users do once they're online."

According to Coroneos, ISPs are increasingly finding themselves in crossfire between users on the one side and governments trying to impose control on the Web.

"Nearly anyone with a gripe about how the Internet is used is trying to place the responsibility of control on IAPs, social networking sites, and other intermediaries. The tension is playing out in legal debates around the world," he says.

IAPs are assisting international governments to address issues such as child pornography, Coroneos adds. IAPs need to conform to government policy or they could face harsher regulations in the future.

Filtering software is still far from perfect, he says. "It's not uncommon for a content filtering solution to allow material that should be forbidden to sneak through, yet accidentally block harmless, legitimate content. This is not an issue where filters are used voluntarily by users and can be turned on or off, but it is problematic where filtering occurs by government mandate and the lists are not transparent to the public."

Another concern is that filters applied at the IAP server level may degrade Internet access speeds. Studies indicate that filters may produce 22% to 80% degradation in access speeds; the best performing filter in a recent lab test showed a latency of 2%, but had the highest error rate.

He says: "While there will always be a place for appropriate regulation, education and end-user empowerment supported by international co-operation at industry and government levels will provide the best outcomes in the end."

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