Doom for the Internet or a piss weak story?

Oh dear, Stilgherrian is pushing another piece of apocalyptic doom in Crikey today (not sure if its behind the paywall or not).

I've provided my response to Crikey as follows;

Stilgherrian has thankfully at last acknowledged that an index based filter of the internet can work without degrading the Internet. He now wants to have us believe that the process of delivering the blacklist to ISPs will bring the Internet crashing down all because of one example from Google.

The first and obvious answer, as demonstrated by his power supply story, is that there are risks in all networks, but the good news is that all networks have in place risk management plans. These processes are what enable networks to handle the outages they get. In the specific case of an index based internet filter the risk planning would include (a) after hours arrangements for communicating list failure with ACMA (b) a alarm bell that would ring if the list file was too big (if it specified as a list of ISP addresses unlike the list of URLs Google was using it couldn't happen from a single slash) (c) alarms that trigger before network traffic "fills" the network. And the actual scenario of the IP addresses the network engineers ned to access being included in the "blacklist" can similarly be dealt with by rejecting the blacklist file if it contains IP addresses required to run the network.

So thanks to Stil for providing the first exercise in risk planning for the implementation of the filter to a network. But it still fails, just like his political censorship and other scare stories, as a reason to not implement a filter.

Meanwhile, Crikey also reports on the consequence of the confirmation of the left-right deal for the effect on the SDA, aka "the shoppies".

As Crikey notes

For such an influential union, the SDA's history is enlightening. Crikey readers would be aware that its predecessor disaffiliated from the ALP in the wake of the 1955 DLP split. For the next 30 years, it functioned as the industrial base of conservative Catholicism until finally re-admitted to the party to shore-up Bob Hawke's base in 1984. However, its legacy remains for the most part undimmed.

That "conservative Ctholicism" used to be an important part of Stephen Conroy's personal power base. Maybe he'll venture to be a bit clearer about his filtering policy now!