Australia's Web Filtering Pilot Delayed Until January

The Australian government's plans to pilot the filtering of what it deems to be objectionable Internet content has been pushed back to sometime mid-January from its plans to start it just before Christmas, The Australian reports.

In addition, The Australian noted that the Rudd government was distancing itself from a report commissioned by the previous Howard government (and written by the Internet Industry Association) that the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday disclosed, "concluded that schemes to block inappropriate content such as child pornography are fundamentally flawed."

The Australian government has refused to comment on why it won't let the IAA report become public, or why it was continuing with the pilot in spite of the report.

In an attempt at positive spin, the government said the report's negative conclusions were the reason why the pilot was still moving forward - it had to see whether the report's conclusions were indeed true. Given that the pilot was in reality part of fulfilling a Rudd government campaign promise, you have to give the government credit for trying to make lemonade out of its political lemons.

The government also said that it was considering the filtering of peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic as part of the pilot. It was unclear whether any of the ISPs who had agreed to participate had also agreed to this new requirement.

All of this to-and-fro will provide great theater for the next couple of months as the government undoubtedly will claim that the filtering pilot was a great success, and the ISP's casting doubt on it all. Stay tuned.