3 July 2026

Welcome

Just a brief intro today as I’m writing this on the train from Sydney to Newcastle. It’s a lovely day, and of course the world of technology policy is going just fine.

eSafety to get more teen ban powers?

As foreshadowed last week, the government introduced the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026.

The bill significantly expands the eSafety Commissioner’s information-gathering powers. In particular, it would give them the power to “compel the production of information or documents from any person” if they believe they’re relevant to the platform’s compliance with the social media age restrictions.

The bill would also double the maximum civil penalty for contraventions of the age restrictions, from 30,000 to 60,000 penalty units. That’s currently equivalent to $99 million for a body corporate.

The government had wanted to rush the bill through this week, but the Coalition and the Greens have pushed it out to a Senate committee review. The committee has to report by 25 August so make your submissions quickly.

Meanwhile, International Justice Mission (IJM) Australia has called on the government to move faster on digital duty of care laws, something that’s meant to be happening but so far isn’t — although some politicians want to speed things up.

And, reports The Saturday Paper, the eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has told the royal commission into antisemitism that social media platforms are battling to retain gore and fringe content.

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Also in the news this week

• The government introduced the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, and has sent it for Senate committee review. The reporting deadline is 17 August so once again you’ll need to make your submissions quickly.

• The Senate has passed legislation to return human oversight to the process for deciding on the level of home support and care for elderly people. Previously, expert assessors were prohibited from overriding the decision of the algorithm.

• The ACCC is taking Amazon to court for introducing adverts to Prime Video under allegedly unfair contract terms, terms which “allowed it to unilaterally make negative changes during the contract period without offering subscribers a remedy”.

• The government will soon allow private-sector organisations to hook into the myID digital ID system, but they will have to pay.

• Some of the largest Facebook groups supporting One Nation are run by foreign “meme factories”. It’s good money by South East Asian standards. Creators could make US$20 for two posts that reach 50,000 people, for example.

• Firmus Technologies is trying to calm people’s concerns that their proposed datacentres in northern Tasmania would be unsustainable, saying that its Launceston site would use “less water than one restaurant” and be no louder than a library. Is Tasmania ready?, asks ABC News.

• Australian telcos have been given new rules for mobile coverage maps. As Information Age reports, “The new mapping rules are a blow to Telstra, which previously said its network covered over 3 million square kilometres — a claim its rivals contested, saying Telstra had ‘lied’ by including areas where signals were too faint to be used by typical mobile devices”.

• Telstra will be replacing its old Customer Access Network (CAN) Radio for remote locations with a new satellite-based system. Residents on remote cattle stations have safety concerns, in part because the new system won’t have integrated solar power as a backup.

• A whole bunch of folks in the so-called creative industries have signed an open letter calling for the protection of copyright in the face of AI. “No use without PERMISSION and PAYMENT for our creative content” is the bottom line. So far there’s more than 4,000 signatures from authors, artists, songwriters, composers, music publishers, and industry organisations. Meanwhile, music by Australian acts has been found in an AI training set, because of course it has.

• From The Conversation, “People can learn to spot AI faces — but the clues are no longer obvious”.

• Nine, of TV and newspaper fame, has signed an AI content deal with Microsoft.

• From ABC News, “Pornhub, the world’s biggest adult platform, has blocked advertising by Australian AI porn site OurDream after the ABC revealed it could be breaching laws against child exploitation material”. OurDream has “categorically reject[ed]” the charge.

• Australian public service agencies were required to appoint a chief AI officer (CAIO) by 1 July, but two of them have failed: the Inspector-General of Taxation (IGT), and the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA). To be fair, NEPA was only established in 1 July.

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Elsewhere

• Donald Trump has made more than US$1.4 billion from crypto during his first year back on office. “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest,” said White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly. So there!

• OpenAI is “in early talks” to give the US government a 5% stake in the company, arguing that this would share the benefits of AI and involve other firms doing something similar. Is this weird? It feels weird.

• A movie about OpenAI boss Altman has been cancelled by Amazon’s Prime Video, probably because OpenAI is now an Amazon partner and Altman wasn’t portrayed in a positive light.

• A scoop from WIRED: “Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta pretended to be kids in order to see how other chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT would respond to high-risk subjects,” including suicide, sex, and drugs.

• Anthropic’s latest Fable and Mythos AI models are no longer banned from export from the US, so all that lasted just three weeks.

• An interesting report from The Observer in the UK: There’s a revolt against AI in the US, which is opening a new rift in the country’s politics.

• Tripadvisor is posting AI summaries of hotel reviews, and British consumer group Which? has found they fail to include key information such as reports of food poisoning, sexual harassment, and serious hygiene failures.

• People don’t trust health information on social media, but they still use it, according to a survey of more than 7,000 US adults. Another poll showed that frequent AI chatbot users were more likely to believe anti-vaccine myths.

• Scammers are being squeezed out of South East Asia, which means they could end up moving to Pacific Islands nations as their internets improve.

• Sony will stop supplying physical discs for PlayStation games in 2028, making them available via download only. There is much consternation in the gaming communities.

• Please be enjoying some horrifying AI-generated kids’ books.

Inquiries of note

• Apart from the social media and online gambling legislative reviews already mentioned, there's a review of international production orders made under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. These are when Australia and another country have an agreement to assist each other by providing law enforcement and intelligence agencies with intercepted communications, stored communications, or telecommunications data. Submissions close 24 September.

What’s next?

Parliament is now on its usual long winter break until 11 August.

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