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> It occurs to me that the blocking of such sites is manifestly
> anti-competitive. I wonder if there's potential for litigation against
> companies that produce filtering software for anti-competitive practices?
I have been pondering on the possible dark side of the effects of
government mandated internet content blocking being used as the
mercenary to cyber sabotage successful ecommerce enterprises from
Australia by local or oversea parties using tactics which might not
illegal, especially by those who feel threatened by internet
ecommerce.
Australian ecommerce enterprises wishing to export might wish to set up
sites in US so as to be closer and faster to the larger US market while
able to use the more secure encryption technology. However this might
expose them to the risks of being cut off from the home market thanks
to the censorship legislation. Alternatively, successful ecommerce
relationships between local and oversea sites might be abruptly
terminated.
Thousands of small and medium size ecommerce sites might be hosted on
the same physical computer with a single IP address. The CSIRO report
goes into much detail about IP address based blocking and highlighted
that this is indiscriminate. However blocking at the ISPs or national
level might require the more efficient IP address based blocking
without looking into the data packets. Thousand of sites might be
blocked at the same time if it is errorously determined that the porn
site has sole use of the IP address.
Some sites might not enforce the seperation of virtual hosts, i.e.
the virtual host name part of the URL is interchangeable. Thus at
the cost of setting up a porn site at that oversea host, it is possible
to mislead the filtering software bots to mis-classify and to block the
legitimate site. It might even be as simple as leading the bots to
the visitor comment page with a few carefully chosen words. Many
people also have reported experiences of receiving the wrong contents
from the co-resident virtual hosts.
Sites that rigidly seperate all the virtual hosts might not be safe.
There are high end filtering softwares for ISP with stated blocking
policy that if two or more offensive sites are found on the same
physical IP address, the whole computer is blocked. So at the cost of
setting up two virtual porn sites the whole physical site can be
canned. For this market segment there appeared to be incentive to find
reasons to use the more efficient IP address blocking.
>From the many mis-classified and collateral damages being reported
it is doubtful that a 100% accurate and cost effective blocking
list can be maintained.
David Chia, RMIT University