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In a post on his company’s blog yesterday (we recommend you click here for the full post), iiNet chief regulatory officer Steve Dalby pointed out, using a range of arguments, the fact undisputed by the technology industry that it is technically impossible to stop websites from being blocked, due to the fundamental nature of the Internet.“We know the pointlessness of simply blocking sites like The Pirate Bay, when they can change their address in minutes. The Internet has no gate that we can put a padlock on,” the executive wrote.Firstly, Dalby pointed out, there were literally millions of sites which hosted ‘torrents’ — the small files needed to distribute content via peer to peer file-sharing site BitTorrent. If one were blocked, even a popular site such as the Pirate Bay, then plenty of others could still be used.“Sure, we can get a minute-by-minute list from the government of all the possible sites, and try and stop the plague of locusts with a can of fly spray, but who’s going to keep the list up to date, who’s going to police it, who’s going to pay?” he asked.“Even when a popular BitTorrent search engine does fall, others quickly take its place. Blocking The Pirate Bay and other high-profile BitTorrent search engines will do very little to stop Australians using BitTorrent – file sharing is a multi-headed Hydra that government filtering and legal threats will never slay.”Dalby also pointed out that even if the Government did ask ISPs such as iiNet to block specific sites, then users could easily bypass those blocks by using proxy services, including proxy services specifically dedicating to defeating government blocks around the world.“Using a proxy service is child’s play, literally. School kids already use proxy services to beat school filtering and access Facebook and YouTube in the classroom. Other people use them at their work desk to outfox their IT department. It may not be right, and we don’t promote it, but let’s take whatever steps we take with our eyes wide open. Let’s not buy into the ‘futility-on-a-stick’ that Hollywood is peddling in Canberra,” Dalby wrote.VPN services are also available, which perform some of the same functions. “VPN services are, once again, child’s play to use, just by installing the software and clicking a button to mask location and hide activities from prying eyes,” Dalby wrote.“The only way the government could stop this traffic would be to block all encrypted traffic, a Herculean task that even the most determined dictatorships struggle to enforce. Anonymity tools, such as the TOR network (68.7 million hits), might still come to the rescue – it’s often used by political activists, but the impact of VPN blocking, on legitimate business users should certainly dissuade the Australian government from thinking about prohibiting or blocking encrypted traffic and VPN sessions.”Then too, Dalby wrote, BitTorrent was not the only peer to peer network.“Apart from peer-to-peer networks, which the government is focusing on its “copyright crackdown”, there is a wealth of file-sharing sites where a wide array of media files can be found. Once again, they keep popping up faster than they can take them down. If Internet users still can’t find what they’re looking for, there’s always the vast Usenet newsgroup archives.”
