The implementation proposed in the Bill can, either through technical failure or human error, or both, render our commercial communication inoperable; whether this is our ability to market our products and services to you or our ability to obtain products or services from you; as our vendor.

The following link explains the Bill, the debate, and further information in order to get a better understanding it's effects.

http://www.efa.org.au/Campaigns/99.html

As an aside, the legislation also ignores the responsible and responsive actions of ISPs to those issues the legislation purports to be addressing.

Let me explain point two first because it is the easiest to articulate.

We are a company of two working directors who commenced trading in August 1991 and have completed successful technology contracts for a large Australian Navy contractor, for Australia's largest telecommunications provider, and for mining company clients, amongst others.

We are in the final stages of a design for a geophysical exploration client, a design from which we are retaining IP (design) rights for the product's battery management system.

After eight years as a company providing innovative technical solutions for our clients, we are preparing to market a battery management product based on our own technology. It is a niche product for medium power portable electronic systems in the diverse market areas of mining, field test equipment, RAPS (remote area power systems), and remote telecommunications. The Internet represents the single most effective marketing tool for this product because of the technical audience we need to reach; an audience which uses the Internet as it's primary source of product information.

The effective use of the World Wide Web depends on continuous availability of our product information. Most competent Internet users will not attempt further access to a domain which has failed to deliver on request. A good analogy to missing Internet pages is a White Pages telephone directory which is published daily and an examination of the latest issue reveals that a company no longer has an entry. To the directory user, that company has ceased to exist.

The proposed legislation will attempt to dictate a regime for blocking sites which the Australian Broadcasting Authority deems "unacceptable". The single largest risk for our company is that miscalculation, mishap, or technical incompetence will cause the blocking system to overlap legitimate commercial Internet sites; such as ours. The legislation addresses this risk by indemnifying the ISP from consequential loss to those companies whose legitimate commercial data has been inappropriately removed.

This is not surprising. The techniques which the Bill alludes to as viable implementation methods have been roundly criticised by a large part of the Internet technical community and declared unworkable in a report prepared by the CSIRO.

http://www.csiro.au/news/mediarel/mr1999/mr9975.html

We are evaluating methods that will allow us to monitor access to our Internet domain from international servers in an attempt to trap faults in the proposed blocking systems. Our only option in the event of this legislation becoming law is to prepare a recovery plan to minimise our commercial loss. This relies heavily on a 24 hour per day response from the administrator (the ABA) and our ISP.

The real damage will not be visible.

Returning to the first point described above, our evaluation of the types of Internet systems being promoted as part of the "New Safer Internet" has revealed deficiencies which have serious consequences to our daily Internet usage. Over several weeks, during our normal worldwide search for components for the latest design, we were able to apply equivalent research regimes for electronic components to the "filtered" search engine ISeek.

This search engine was, at some stage, promoted by Senator Alston as an example of the sorts of tools on which the legislation will be reliant.

It operates (the word "works" may be misconstrued if used in this discussion) by filtering keywords presented to the ISeek search page, passing the request to a standard search engine (ISeek passes the requests to LookSmart), filters the response and presents the outcome of these machinations.

For a common electronic component (whose name we have been unable to attach any arcane connotations that suggest it could be deemed offensive) the following search results were returned:

AltaVista, our preferred search engine for electronic components, returned 8545 entries. The dynamic nature of the search data is such that the week previously it had returned 8430 entries; so approximately 8500.

The ISeek search returned 1591.

We suspected that the search engine hidden behind ISeek may have been the poor performer. A direct search to LookSmart using the same search criteria surprised us. It returned 9330 entries; even better than AltaVista.

We are able to provide the search criteria for this example if you wish to contact our company info@decisions-and-designs.com.au.

It is not published here simply because one email list discussion, critical of the words restricted by ISeek, appears to have resulted in "modifications" in search outcomes. In the opinion of this company director, I cannot see any benefit in artificially correcting particular inconsistencies if the thousands of future search requests we make will all require a telephone call to ISeek to "tickle it up a bit".

We are a company that relies on international purchasing of specialist components for rapid product prototyping. FedEx regularly delivers international parcels to our door from the USA, Asia, and the UK in two days. The basis of our research and development relies on obtaining the optimum component. For our company, the real extent of missed commercial opportunity will never be visible using restricted access search methodology promoted by supporters of this Bill.

If you have any scepticism of the claims made in point 2 about the commercial loss incurred using the proposed blocking technology then I urge you to make the logical connection between both of the issues raised here.

I also urge you to apply keywords used in your own commercial domain to both a filtered and an unfiltered search engine and evaluate the impact on your own commercial activities.

You might also want to mull over the sorts of words you may use in everyday language which could isolate your Internet presence from public view.

Our political servants seem to be ignoring the articulate, reasoned, technically sound arguments that have been presented to them by the Internet community during this debate.

They also pay lip service to the efforts of Internet Service Providers in providing technical solutions to facilitate access by members of the Australian community of all ages.

I urge all commercial users of the Internet to evaluate the likely impact of this bizarre legislative folly and communicate any specific concerns you may have to your political representative.

Harry McNally 30 May 1999