(Image by liam.jon_d under CC BY SA 2.0).

Asher Moses reports that “The Government's plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled, following an independent senator's decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to get the scheme started.”

This news has set the blogosphere and twitter alight with celebration. Unfortunately, that may all be a bit premature.

While it is true that a mandatory filtering proposal is likely to require legislation to implement (especially without the support of the Internet Industry Association and a voluntary code of conduct), it is not clear that any future legislation is dead in the water just yet.

The current makeup of the Senate requires either the support of the coalition or the support of all seven minor party and independent senators. Scott Ludlam, the Greens' spokesperson for communications, had already made it clear that the Greens will not support mandatory filtering. The Coalition has indicated that it has 'grave reservations' about Labor's mandatory filtering plan, with Senator Minchin releasing an op-ed criticising the plan as insulting to parents.

This leaves two other senators, Nick Xenophon and Steve Fielding. Fielding, representing Family First, has stated that he would support a mandatory filter, and would like to see its scope increased. Xenophon is now said to have 'withdrawn all support' for the plan, saying “the more evidence that's come out, the more questions there are on this”.

So far, this all sounds like pretty good news for opponents of the mandatory filter. However, the process is not over yet. As several commentators have already noted, the fate of any proposed legislation is still unclear.

It has only been a short time since we saw Senator Xenophon support the Government's stimulus package in exchange for an agreement to fast-track $900 million for water buy-backs in the Murray-Darling Basin. There is no guarantee (apart from a budget deficit) that similar deals will not be on the table in the future.

There is also no guarantee that Liberal or National Senators will not cross the floor in support of Labor's filtering scheme. A notable feature of Howard's last term was the the power of the small number of Coalition Senators who were prepared to cross the floor and vote with Labor on certain policies.

Finally, while on the subject of Howard, we have to remember that we will have a half Senate election in the next 18 to 26 months. There is a distinct possibility that Rudd, like Howard, will consolidate his position and gain a double majority by winning a few extra seats in the upper house. If this happens, the Government may not need the support of the cross-benchers to introduce mandatory filtering.

Until there is an indication that Conroy and the Labor party have dropped their ill-thought out proposal for mandatory internet filtering, there is still much work to be done.

Last week Dale Clapperton and myself gave evidence to the Senate Select Committee on the National Broadband Network. EFA had previously provided a written submission to the Senate, voicing concerns about the increased cost to users and the potential anti-competitive effects of the proposal.

We noted that the NBN would be likely to significant increase internet access costs to users, and that what we should be focusing on at the moment is increasing download quotas and upstream speeds:

Mr Clapperton—We are saying that least some of that 98 per cent of Australians would be disadvantaged, not only our members. In the market people can already get internet services of approximately the same speed as would be available under the NBN and can get it so much cheaper. Certainly that proportion of the market would be worse off under the NBN because they would be in a position of either paying more for what they currently have or having less than they currently have because they cannot afford to pay more. I do not have any firm statistics on the number of people who currently have access to what you might call NBN-grade services, but it is certainly a non-trivial number. Those people would be disadvantaged. For the people who cannot currently get what you might call an NBN grade service the question is going to be: they might be able to get it under the new environment but can they afford it? There is really only so much that your average household might be willing to pay for internet access. I am currently paying $50 a month. Under the NBN environment the most recent pricing that I have seen, a suggestion by Telstra, is that their wholesale price for a service of comparative speed to a reseller would be more than I am paying retail at the moment, so my cost would certainly go up. I think a lot of people would be in the situation of saying, ‘Yes, fine. We can get a 12 megabit service under the NBN, but we just can’t afford it. Even if we could afford it, we could only use it for an hour or so a month at full speed and then we will have to put our hand in our pocket again to pay for it.’ There is unfortunately something of a fallacious public perception at the moment that the cost of a fast notionally unlimited internet connection is $50 or $60 a month, when that is quite simply not the case. That is only sustainable at a retail level because ISPs are really oversubscribing their services. That is why you see things such as download limits. The true cost of even a one megabit internet service that you can use at one megabit all month is not less than $100. It is probably over $1,000.

Mr Suzor—The reason we are critically concerned about download quotas and upstream capabilities is that the use of the internet is changing in Australia. It is not just about having a high-speed network to browse the occasional webpage. We are looking at connections that are always on. We are looking at cloud computing, where people are increasingly moving their applications away from their desktop and onto the internet via various servers around the world. All of this takes upstream processing. We are looking at people who are participating in various multimedia and content rich services, so people who are uploading and downloading videos and participating in a real global conversation. As these sorts of activities increase we have to be very careful about the very high costs that we currently pay in Australia for upload content and download quotas—cents per megabytes above a certain quota and upstream speeds—in order to participate in participatory communication. This is something we are very concerned about at the moment.

We suggested that the proposed $4.7bn investment would be better spent bringing access to rural areas and increasing infrastructure based competition.

The full text of the hearing is available on the Hansard Senate website (direct link to PDF).