While the world looks at Iranians getting past official government censorship via Twitter, in another part of the world, Internet filters imposed by the government are also causing problems. We’re talking, once again, about Australia.
Australian Senator Conroy, who tried to bully a network engineer who pointed out that a mandatory Internet filtering scheme would be ineffective and create massive network performance problems, is now going after, of all things, World of Warcraft.
A bit of background on this: In most industrialized nations, video games have ratings systems. The United States uses the ESRB rating system, the U.K. uses the British Board of Film Classification, Europe uses PEGI, and Australia…
Well, Australia is a strange duck. While in the United States we have the “M” rating for mature games, and PEGI and BBFC have 18/18+ ratings for games, Austraila’s Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) has no problem with the “R18+” rating for films – similar to our “R” rating, but it offers no “R” rating for video games – classification stops at MA15+ – or content suitable for 15 year olds.
The effect of this has been that in Australia, retail sales of video games have been limited only to those that the ratings board feels are suitable for 15 year olds. Never mind that the age of the average gamer in Australia is 28. So in order to get a retail release in Australia, often violent games, such as Prototype, have to be censored and re-edited – or they cannot be sold in Australia’s retail stores.
Games requiring editing before they could be released in Australia include: “50 Cent: Bulletproof,” “Fallout 3,” and “Grand Theft Auto IV.” In the case of Fallout 3, the only change was to rename an in-game drug from “morphine” to “Med-X.”
Anyway, Australian gamers could order these games internationally, or download them through the Internet, but the filtering scheme proposed by the government is set to be expanded to block any video games that do not receive a rating from the OFLC – and since the OFLC does not give an 18+ rating, the effect is to ban all game content not suitable for 15 year olds.
But this will affect one game in particular: “World of Warcraft.” As Escapist Magazine writes:
MMOGs like World of Warcraft have so far been exempt from classification in Australia but could also be impacted by the scheme. “That exemption is the only reason why multi-player games with user-generated environments are possible in this country,” said Mark Newton, an engineer and critic of the filtering plan. “Without it, it’d only take one game user anywhere in the world to produce objectionable content in the game environment to make the Australian Government ban the game for everyone.”
It won’t work, of course. But the reason why it won’t work is particularly important for network performance reasons – that is, the solution around most Internet censorships is through the use of proxies. It’s how tweets are coming out of Iran, it’s how people access facebook at work. With mandatory Internet filtering, however, Australian gamers are going to start using proxies in nearby countries – Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, etc., to bypass Australian censorship filters.
And as much as this may seem like the punchline to a baudy geek joke, people spend way more time playing World of Warcraft than downloading Internet porn. The information on how to set up a proxy overseas will spread very quickly. This will cause a major change in traffic patterns in the entire Oceania/SE Asian region.
So if your company has business interests in either region, it might be a good idea to make sure that you’re monitoring your network for changes in traffic densities in overseas lines – and make sure that no one’s desktop-computer WoW proxy impacts performance for the enterprise.
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