Liam Tung from ZDNet has been talking to ISPs and IT industry professionals about the filters and their impact. >> Read ZDNet's story here

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1) How would ISPs be affected by filtering?

Until ISPs actually test the filters, which is the next stage the government wants to address, it is not fully known how it would impact them.

It could be expected that ISPs would need to redesign networks to enable content to be filtered in the way the government wants. High-end filters suitable for an ISP are also very expensive to maintain.

There is also concern that filters would have a negative effect on network performance, however no one knows yet to what extent this would occur or how much this would affect end-users in terms of slowing down access to the Internet.

2) How popular is Peer to Peer sharing in Australia - and is this on the increase?

Peer to peer or "P2P" services such as BitTorrent are popular in Australia, as they are in the rest of the world. In discussions I have had with a network engineer at the ISP Internode, general P2P traffic represents between 35 to 55 per cent of an ISP's network traffic. It is the most intensive protocol used today.

Its use is on the increase because people find it handy to share files across, whether that's sound, images, videos or documents. While it has become associated with sharing illegally downloaded music files, it is also used for legitimate business and general purposes, for example sharing movies, games, and documents.

3) How does ZDNet gauge the general mood for this legislation (are most for or against and why)?

Most people from what I can see are against mandatory ISP filtering. The arguments are both ideological and technical.

On the ideological front, people do not want the internet to be censored or controlled by a government. This type of filtering has been associated with "only the most repressive regimes in the world," according to the Internet Industry Association.

Readers have also said that the government only wants to be seen as "doing something good" to tackle the issue of child pornography; and that filtering would do nothing but ruin the internet for those users who haven't done anything wrong.

On the technical side, current filtering technologies cannot deliver the government's desired "clean feed". There are two parts to the clean feed: identifying content deemed inappropriate and then blocking that content.

While the filters recently tested could detect and block content on standard web traffic - called "HTTP" protocol - none of the technologies tested could inspect content on instant message or peer to peer networks, which make up the bulk of an ISP's traffic and can be used to share what the government deems inappropriate content.

No one seems to be arguing against the idea of protecting children, but there are strong arguments against doing it with technology. Most believe that educating children to make mature choices would produce the best result.