Bad news for Australian internet users: it doesn't look like peer-to-peer traffic will escape the government filtering being imposed to censor online materials. Under the guise of "protecting the children", Australian ISPs are being directed to filter out "inappropriate" and "prohibited" material as spelled out on a list compiled by the government. The list will include material that is totally legal for Australians to view, own, and sell, yet has now been deemed unsuitable for transmission online. Understandably, the government's position has earned it hordes of critics, but it doesn't look ready to back down. This latest announcement in fact steps-up the level of censorship, which was previously thought to only target web traffic, now likely going after BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer shares.
 

The concept of filtering BitTorrent traffic based on its content is much more difficult than filtering or blocking certain web pages. It's very hard for software to scan torrents in the same way it could scan a text-based web page for objectionable content, and while it's easy to blacklist a web server hosting illicit pages, every user who downloads a torrent is potentially a new server, keeping the information moving around. This could be a problem in the future if filtering tests fail and the Australian government continues to push for restrictions on P2P connections, lest they be a loophole in the censorship system.

For the average Australian internet user, this is mainly an issue of rights and propriety for now - there haven't been any court challenges like the Communications Decency Act faced in the U.S., where overzealous censorship gets in the way of legitimate medical content. At the same time, the idea of filtering BitTorrent for specific censorship targets sends the message to users that copyright infringement isn't a big concern of the government's (so long as you're only sharing PG movies), a possible trade-off that makes the censorship easier to swallow for users engaged in piracy. For now at least, the government's plans seem to be smoothly rolling forward, with ISPs already lined up, volunteering to be the first to test the program's implementation on their subscribers.

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