After all the complaining by the public and after all of the technical opposition to the filter, the australian government has gone live with the pilot of the “clean feed”. The initial round of ISP’s involved in the trial are:

It seems 3 of the biggest ISPs were shunned (Telstra, Optus & iiNet) for what we can assume is more users = more issues = more failure. Apart from Primus nobody in Australia will really know of the ISPs mentioned. Webshield actually sell a clean feed onto their customers as a business model so it’s no wonder they want in on this. Funnily enough I used to work for an ISP who resold Highway 1 ADSL connections, luckily for me I don’t now.

The testing will take place for six weeks once the equipment has been installed at the ISPs, and will examine impacts on performance, user experience and also the ease of circumvention. Customers will get to choose if they want to participate in the trial.

The pilot will involve two filtering techniques — a simple filter of the ACMA blacklist, and a more invasive content filtering solution.