iiNet ditches internet censorship trial  

The Age reports that Australia's best ISP, iinet, is refusing to participate in the government's internet censorship trials any further (originally they agreed to participate purely to prove it wouldn't work), citing corporate social responsibility - iiNet pulls out of net censorship trials.

Australia's third largest internet provider, iiNet, has withdrawn from the Government's internet censorship trials, saying it could not "reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility".

The move comes after the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks last week published a leaked copy of the secret Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) blacklist of prohibited websites, which forms the backbone of the Government's censorship policy.

Far from containing just "illegal material" such as child pornography, the list of prohibited websites includes a wealth of legal material such as regular gay and straight porn sites, YouTube links, online poker sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites and even the sites of a Queensland dentist, a school canteen consultancy and an animal carer.

The Government's mandatory internet censorship plan, which is already being trialled by a number of small ISPs, will block sites contained on the ACMA blacklist for all Australians.

"We are not able to reconcile participation in the trial with our corporate social responsibility, our customer service objectives and our public position on censorship," iiNet managing director Michael Malone said.

"It became increasingly clear that the trial was not simply about restricting child pornography or other such illegal material, but a much wider range of issues including what the Government simply describes as 'unwanted material' without an explanation of what that includes." ...

Senator Conroy and ACMA initially tried to discredit Wikileaks by saying the leaked blacklist was about double the size of ACMA's list. However, they admitted that both lists shared "some common URLs".

Wikileaks said the disparity was due to the fact that the leaked list was from August last year and contained a number of older URLs that had since been removed by ACMA.

It quickly followed up by leaking a second version of the blacklist, dated March 18 this year, that is approximately the same size as the ACMA list and contains many of the same seemingly innocuous websites. The renegade site also published instructions on how people can verify that the leaked list is legitimate.

The list was obtained by Wikileaks from internet filtering software that parents can opt to install on their computers. ACMA provides its list of prohibited sites to these software developers for inclusion in their products.

Wikileaks was offline over the weekend and continues to be inaccessible, with a message on the site saying that it is "currently overloaded by readers". It plans to deploy additional resources to resolve the issue and is calling for people to help out with donations.

Last week's leak of the ACMA blacklist reignited concerns that the internet filtering proposal could have unintended consequences for innocent businesses.