Senator Ludlam asked:
a) How many other parties, commercial or otherwise, are you negotiating with-third-party providers-in order effectively to outsource the surveillance role that the filter will not be able to handle?

b) Which parties are you in negotiations with and for what reasons?

c) Were there any other interest groups with specific interest in the net filter that the Minister met with prior to the announcement of the policy?

Answer:
a) The Government is consulting with a number of operators of high usage sites, including Facebook, Myspace, Microsoft and YouTube.

b) See response to (a) above.

The Enex report on the ISP filtering live pilot noted that high traffic sites could overload certain filtering solutions. Consultations are being undertaken with owners of high traffic sites on the possible implementation of arrangements by these sites to either take down material on the Refused
Classification content list, or to block it from access by users in Australia. Owners of most popular overseas-hosted websites that provide user-generated content already have arrangements in place to take down offensive material. Many of these policies are in many instances wider than the scope of Refused Classification content. For example, see http://au.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines.

c) The Minister and/or the Department has met with a wide range of stakeholders to discuss details regarding the implementation of ISP-level filtering, including ISPs, filtering technology vendors and key industry and community organisations.