Chairman Krudd - Stop internet censorship in Australia

1. When some filtering software blocks a web page, it pretends that the web page does not exist or that the web server is down, rather than giving a clear message that the page has been blocked. This will make it difficult to distinguish the effects of the filter from routine network and server problems.

2. The filter itself may be down. The filter is an additional point of failure. It remains to be seen how this is handled.

3. Most filters have limitations and it is likely that some things on the internet that previously worked will just stop working.

4. Some filtering software causes all customers of a given ISP to appear to be using the same computer (the computer that is running the filtering software). This can distort statistics that a web site owner may collect, as well as interfering with operation of that web site (for example, if the web site intends to adjust the content depending on the location of the user).

5. Inevitably stuff-ups and other unforeseen scenarios will arise. For example, in the UK some do-gooder decided that one page in Wikipedia, which contained an image of a 30-year-old album cover, should be blocked. The effect was that the filter started to scrutinize all requests to any of the more than 2 million pages in Wikipedia and that noone in the UK could edit any page of Wikipedia at all.

Sadly, the above is the "best case scenario", assuming that the filter uses a "blacklist" approach to filtering. On the other hand, if the filter is of a type that examines the actual text and image content in order to decide whether to block, it will be even more unreliable, as well as much slower.