Somebody think of the children!

The moment Comms Minister Stephen Conroy announced the seemingly fabled plans to purify the Internet, I hit the phones and called around the industry circuit.

I assumed it political folly, bandied about perhaps to appease a few mulish pollies. I'm no IT expert, but even I knew putting a giant sieve on Australia's broadband pipes will be neither easy nor cheap, if not an altogether impossible task.

All the major ISPs told me the plan is laughable, some said (and still maintain) it will be technically impossible. The news sent many smaller players into panic over who will foot the bill, and whether they will be compensated for a reduction in network speeds.

Six months later, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) produces a shining report on content filtering technology, loaded with statistics that makes PR work easy. Apparently the filters have come a long way since the government's 2005 lab tests which returned abysmal results.

This time I barely had a chance to hit the phones before industry was pumping out scathing criticism of the tests, all pointing to the difference in scale between the clean, smooth Telstra lab network in which the trial was conducted and the erratic, occasionally patchworked, national network.

The local System Administrators Guild divided the network speeds by the number of simulated users, multiplied by X and found the filters were actually tested over slower than dial-up speeds with a fraction of the load borne by even the smallest ISPs.

Extrapolate this out, the guild says, and the small 3 percent false positive rate means about 3000 legitimate sites will be blocked every second.

But the government soldiers on, undeterred from its crusade against all things nefarious, with plans to pilot its giant sieve on Australia's Internet. It is then that the facts, whatever they may be, will be made undeniable.