ISP Filter Will Disadvantage Australian Companies
Sun 31 Jan 2010UPDATE:
Thanks to those who provided feedback on this, particularly Jeff Waugh and others via Twitter and Whirlpool. It would appear that requests from overseas to Australian-hosted websites will not be filtered. This means that the problem described below will not eventuate until Google sets up and starts issuing crawl requests from an Australian node. — MikeFitz
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A Deloitte analyst, Damien Tampling, has been reported by ARNnet as predicting the Government’s controversial ISP filter will have minimal long-term effect on Australian businesses.
I think there’s an important factor that Mr Tampling has missed altogether.
It has become clear over the past few months that Google is now placing a higher importance on “Page Load Speed” when calculating Page Rank – the all-important score that gets my business near the top of page 1 of Google search results.
My Australian website, hosted in Australia, will be crawled by the googlebot through an Australian ISP. Senator Conroy says it will load “a blink of an eye” slower, but this is an eternity to the googlebot. My page rank will then be lower than that of a competing US, UK or NZ company. I and other Australian companies will forever be at a commercial disadvantage because of the filter.
As I see it, ISP Filter -> Slower Page Loads -> Lower Google Page Rank -> Commercial disadvantage for Australian companies. What do others think?
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See also…
- Mandatory ISP Filter Mind Map to see where this fits in with all the other arguments against Senator Conroy’s censorship scheme.
- www.stopinternetcensorship.org, particularly the Action Page where there are 5 things you can do right now to help stop internet censorship,
- Whirlpool’s knowledge base article on the “Cleanfeed”,
- Sign EFAs Petition now.
- Wear a Conroy Cartoon T-Shirt.
- See my earlier Conroy Cartoon posts.
January 31st, 2010 at 13:14
At best, this is pure speculation because we haven’t seen the legislation. At worst, this is technical voodoo and complete tripe, because it doesn’t make any sense at all.
The Google crawler doesn’t appear to have any nodes in Australia, so all of its requests come in to Australian hosting facilities at ingress. Even if there were Google crawler requests coming from Australia, they’d still hit Australian hosting facilities at ingress.
There is no sensible reason for hosting facilities to apply the proposed filter at ingress. It would achieve absolutely nothing (even less than the proposed policy would in general). There’s no sensible reason for them to be required to, either.
ISPs (whether they host stuff or provide connectivity) are only likely to apply these filters at one of two points: a) between their end user connections and the rest of their network, or b) at egress. The former makes the most sense in most cases, unless the legislation over-reaches and requires the latter.
I’m all for pointing out the problems with the policy, but pointing out stuff like this just allows us to be accused of deception.
January 31st, 2010 at 13:54
Thanks, Jeff. I gather your objection comes down to whether or not the googlebot will see a filtered or unfiltered view of my website.
So, you’re saying that there’s an unfiltered “back-door” to be used by the googlebot, and presumably, overseas visitors to Australian websites?
January 31st, 2010 at 13:59
There’s no “back door”. Why, legislative or technically, would the filter be applied on ingress, no matter where the request comes from? It makes no sense.
January 31st, 2010 at 14:13
But to view a web page data must flow inbound and outbound and from what Conroy has stated there will be no connection excepted from the filter, therefor for the googlebot to view the webpage, the data returned from the Australian hosted site will traverse the filter.
How if the filter is doing something like a BGP redirect this might not be an issue.
As you said we’ve got no idea how they are going to do this, which is really scary cause we can’t comment on it because “they haven’t said how they’ll do it yet” but they’re keeping that detail secret.
January 31st, 2010 at 14:20
Jeff’s right, there’s absolutely no reason for the filter to activate on requests coming into the country, only those going out of the country. Bots won’t be affected.
I think my record speaks to my hatred of this legislation, but as Jeff pointed out, publishing problems that are wrong take bandwidth away from the valid arguments.
January 31st, 2010 at 14:25
The methods demonstrated in the technical report were straight proxying and a DNS capture -> proxy method… neither of which would be applied to ingress by any sane hosting company or ISP. The only way this could happen would be drastic, dunderheaded legislative over-reach, at which point the entire hosting and business community would go absolutely nuts — and it’d be fixed quickly, without needing to change the rest of the policy.
So again, this is purely speculative and highly unlikely — putting “WILL” in your title is at best incorrect, at worst deceptive.
January 31st, 2010 at 15:04
So Jeff, you’re certain that all googlebot requests come from overseas? And Australian-hosted pages, even if they are on the blacklist, will be visible to overseas visitors?
Also, why would “Google crawler requests coming from Australia hit Australian hosting facilities at an (unfiltered) ingress“? Not trying to be funny here, just don’t understand.
Websinthe, I agree this is far from the most important objection to the filter. However this post came about because I’m unconvinced by Mr Tampling’s assessment.
Matt, thanks for your comment. That’s what I was thinking.
January 31st, 2010 at 17:12
OK, I’ll make it shorter and sweeter: Filtering ingress is insane and pointless.
No one would want to do it, no one would choose to do it, and no one would accept legislation which demanded it.
In my first comment I said that the “Google crawler doesn’t appear to have any nodes in Australia”… but it doesn’t matter anyway -> any Google request to a hosting facility is obviously an incoming connection, not outgoing.
Matt’s wrong because they’ve already demonstrated methodology in the technical report… and there is a big difference between making a TCP connection beyond your network and receiving a TCP connection into your network. They’re not the same thing, and you wouldn’t apply proxy or DNS hacks in the same way.
This should be really easy to grasp: No one’s going to filter at ingress, and I very strongly doubt that they’d be asked to (ie. that the legislation would demand so).
January 31st, 2010 at 17:22
By the way (responding to your update), I doubt it will even matter if Google set up an Australian data centre. Those requests, like the international ones, are still ingress to any other data centre.
I very, very, very strong suspect (note that I’m not saying “know” or “will”!) that only ISPs who provide end point connectivity services will be required to filter requests from those services. Thus my point about “within their network” vs. “egress” in one of my comments above… certainly larger ISPs would tend away from doing anything like this at egress.
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:50
[…] ISP Filter WILL Disadvantage Australian Companies « MikeFitz with overflow bit set… mike.brisgeek.com/2010/01/31/isp-filter-will-disadvantage-australian-companies – view page – cached A Deloitte analyst, Damien Tampling, has been reported by ARNnet as predicting the Government’s controversial ISP filter will have minimal long-term effect on Australian businesses. […]
February 10th, 2010 at 1:02
It does not matter whether the filtering will slow down the internet.
Filtering by the name of moral is simply immoral.
Filtering is basically to create a kindergarten for kids as well as adults. Do we adults need to be contained in such kindergarten?