Internet Service Provider (ISP) Filtering 'Live' Pilot

As part of its commitment to examine the introduction of ISP-level filtering, the Australian Government conducted a live ISP filtering pilot in 2009 to provide valuable information on the effectiveness and efficiency of filters installed in 'real world' ISP networks.

The pilot was managed by Enex TestLab, an independent testing laboratory.

Participating ISPs

A range of ISPs were selected to participate in the ISP filtering pilot—including Highway 1, Nelson Bay Online, Netforce, OMNIconnect, Optus, Primus, TECH2U, Unwired, and Webshield.

What was tested?

The ISP filtering pilot was undertaken to determine key information about different ISP-level content filtering technologies when these are applied to:

  • filtering a defined list of URLs, such as the current Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist (with around 1000 URLs at the time of testing), and
  • in addition to the ACMA blacklist, filtering a wider range and volume of material.

Testing was undertaken within an ISP’s ‘live’ network. The different filtering solutions were assessed against a number of factors including accuracy, effectiveness, impact on network speeds (performance), the relative ease of circumvention and the costs to implement.

The filtering technologies that were tested included pass-by filtering, deep packet inspection, pass-through filtering and proxy filtering (descriptions are outlined in the Enex Report—see below).

Key findings

Filtering Refused Classification (RC) content

The pilot demonstrated that ISPs can effectively filter a list of URLs such as the ACMA blacklist with a very high degree of accuracy and a negligible impact on internet speed.

Filtering additional categories of content

The accuracy results of filtering additional categories of content at the ISP-level, for parents wishing to have further content filtered, showed an improvement on previous testing of ISP-level filtering technologies undertaken by the ACMA, suggesting that commercially available filtering products are becoming increasingly effective.

The pilot demonstrated that implementation of filtering additional categories of content can also block some common circumvention techniques.

Further information

Further information on the Government’s ISP filtering live pilot is available on the Frequently asked Question page relating to ISP‑level filtering.

Enex TestLab report into ISP-level filtering

The report of findings from the ISP filtering pilot is below.

Full report:

Report by section - PDF

Report by section - RTF

 
Document ID: 87718 | Last modified: 10 March 2010, 2:17pm