Labor's ISP censorship and the end of Australian science

[gdt]

To be blunt, if the government's Internet censorship proposal in put into practice unchanged then science in Australia is stuffed.

Science has always been a global undertaking. Researchers interested in the same problems share data, theories and conclusions. Victorian scientists wrote letters to journals, 1970's scientists used faxes, 1980's scientists used computer tapes and in the 1990's scientists built the Internet and the world wide web.

To date the operation of science hasn't been overly hurt by censorship laws. The nearest brush being early research into the social behaviours which spread what we then called LAV/HTLV-III. We had posters at shopping centre bus stops explaining how to clean needles using household bleach -- what modern censors would call "instruction in matters of crime". We handed out leaflets explaining the risks of sexual behaviour, asking gay men to stop anal fisting and other grossly bruising activities and to use condoms whilst committing the crime of "buggery".

Could we do the same on the Labor Internet? What we we did was a private initiative to fill the gap until the necessarily slower but much more organised government programmes got underway, so it would not fit under the "public health" exemption. We would need a website with age verification. That's somewhat pointless when trying to educate the public and wouldn't work at all for educating IV drugs users and gay men (hey, enter your home address here and we'll store it so that the police can get a warrant for it later). Remember that some politicans seriously talked about placing AIDS patients into concentration camps; we had a huge amnount of difficulty just getting enough basic information to stop us double-counting infections.

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There is another group of scientists also effected by the censorship proposal. Scientists now use the Internet to share datasets. A 10Gbps connection is faster than putting tapes on a plane and is a lot more convenient. All of the new instruments are interactive -- for these applications there is no "tape" option anymore.

But no firewall runs at 10Gbps. Sure, some say they do in the spec sheet, but in reality they are CPU-based and add considerable jitter. You'll recall that TCP interprets jitter as desceasing the probability that the round-trip time estimate is correct, and to avoid potential congestion collapse the transmission rate is lowered. So the researcher wanting to send data at 10Gbps cannot achieve this, even though the firewall claims 10Gbps throughput.

The obvious solution is not to run a firewall. But the Labor Internet is a proposal to place a firewall within the ISP's network.

So what projects share datasets at 10Gbps? Basically all the astronomy, physics and biochemistry projects of the coming decade. If the Labor Internet places a firewall in the paths used by those projects then Australian science in those fields is dead. The search for the Higgs Boson will only be claimed by an Australian if that scientist is working outside of Australia. The project to build a half-continent radio telescope -- the Square Kilometre Array -- may as well take place in South Africa, leaving Australia without the top-flight instrument in a field of science it has dominated for 50 years. There will be no rapid access to databases of protemes (the proteins used as messengers by our DNA), reducing Australia's biosciences to a poor joke.

There may well be other projects at risk. One of the advantages of packet switched network is that the users can just use the bandwidth -- no reservation is necessary. The flip-side of this convenience is that finding the research projects which use the capacity is not straightforward.

We might well be able to use some non-Internet scheme for data transfers, such as 10Gbps SDH channels. The costs are higher since the link (and thus the link's cost) cannot be shared. Each project will need to meet the $30m undersea capacity lease.

But if leasing links is the solution then it is easily seen that the Labor Internet ensures that Australia will never again be at the forefront of some sciences. A research grant takes about three years to achieve. Imagine asking for $30m of bandwidth three years prior to your research's requirement. Research is not construction, it's simply not going to happen -- progress three years prior will be too tentative for approval for such a huge expenditure, and if approved then costs will be controlled by limiting the lease of the bandwidth to the minimum. So if your research progresses well you will need to wait months for the necessary bandwidth, and if it progresses slowly (or not all all, since this is research and not all therories are correct) you will have squandered millions.

The beauty to the researcher of using the Internet for data transfer and other scientific collaboration is that the expensive resource need only be bought once, can be shared, and can be used by the researcher as required, using the equipment that they use every day.

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If I sound upset then that is because I am. Like many scientists I have decided not to move to the USA, but to assist solving the problems faced by the country which raised me, encouraged me, and gave me an education in the first place. But if this stupid proposal makes it to actuality then I will either need to move overseas, stay to watch Australian science wither, or take up some non-science job like driving taxis or network engineering for a commercial ISP.

The Internet was originally built as a scientific instrument. The world wide web was orignally built as a scientific instrument. Just because they have continued on to revolutionise telecommunications doesn't mean that the Internet and the WWW no longer serve their scientific purpose.