The Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA) issued just 25 take-down notices for the 1932 items it deemed to be inappropriate online content in the last financial year, the authority's annual report has revealed.
Between 1 July 2009 and 30 June 2010, the ACMA received 3212 complaints relating to online content, a whopping 172 per cent increase on the number of complaints received compared to the last financial year.
Of the 3828 online items from those complaints that the authority investigated in the last year, it identified 1932 items that were deemed prohibited or potentially prohibited content. Just 25 of these items were hosted in Australia, where the ACMA issued take-down notices to the websites. The remaining 1907 items located offshore, mostly in the United States, were reported to the makers of internet filtering software for blocking.
69 per cent of the items identified fell into the refused classification category. Over 55 per cent of this material exploited children, according to the report. However, a number of items were deemed to be sexual fetish, drug use or terrorism-related material and were also refused classification.
The refused classification category is currently the subject of a review by the Classification Board following community criticism of Labor's mandatory internet service provider-level internet filtering policy.
If Labor manages to pass the legislation despite resistance from both the Coalition and the Greens, and the government is successful in implementing the policy, this refused classification material would be the content that could potentially be blocked by the filter.
Due to the large increase in the volume of complaints, the ACMA noted that this delayed the response for some content investigations; however, child abuse material was still dealt with in the shortest amount of time.
"The overall complexity of the complaints, and resulting need for a proportion to be referred to the Classification Board for classification, also impacted on the time frames. Consequently, the ACMA did not deal with all complaints within the applicable time frame, but priority complaints (those dealing with child abuse material) continued to be dealt with within two days," the report stated.
The ACMA put the increase in the level of reporting down to a number of factors, including an increased awareness in how to report prohibited content and a "greater community interest in online content regulation issues".
The ACMA annual report also highlighted the migration of ACMA desktops to Windows 7 as one of the authority's successes in the last financial year.
"The deployment of Windows 7 on all user desktops during the year has put the ACMA at the leading edge of technology deployments in Australian government agencies and the overall ICT community."