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A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society.

That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.

Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuff they'll see online especially so teenagers (they'll find that one way or other) but it's more about the distraction smartphones cause.

Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.

It goes without saying that smartphones are designed to be addictive and we need to protect kids more from this addiction than from from bad online content. That's not to say they should have unfettered access to extreme content, they should not.

It seems to me that having access to only filtered IP addresses would be a better solution.

This ill-considerd gut reaction involving the whole community isn't a sensible decision if for no other reason than it allows sites like Google to sap up even more of a user's personal information.

2025: if you're logged in, then we check your age to see if you can do or see some stuff

2027: the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities

2028: because VPNs are being used to circumvent the law, if the logging entity knows you're an Australian citizen, even if you're not in Australia or using an Aussie IP address then they must still apply the law

2030: you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits

2031: Australian ISPs must enforce the login restrictions because some sites are refusing to and there are loopholes

2033: Australian ISPs must provide the government with a list of people who visited this list of specific sites, with dates and times of those visits

2035: you must be logged in to visit these other specific sites, regardless of your age

2036: you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet

2037: all visits to all sites must be logged in

2038: all visits to all sites will be recorded

2039: this list of sites cannot be visited by any Australian of any age

2040: all visits to all sites will be reported to the government

2042: your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case

Australian politicians, police, and a good chunk of the population would love this.

Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian. It's all "beer and barbies on the beach" but that's all actually illegal.

As an Australian citizen, this further reinforces my position that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that Australia is a laidback country full of easygoing people.

It isn’t. For as long as I can remember it’s been wildly authoritarian, and it seems Australians harbour a fetish for the rules that would make even the average German blush.

Hopefully times have changed (though I don’t think they have), but about 20 years ago, standard fare on the road was to provide essentially no driver training, and then aggressively enforce draconian traffic rules. New drivers can’t drive at night. New drivers have to abide by lower speed limits than other drivers. Police stop traffic for random breathalyser tests. “Double demerit” days…

This seems like more of the same. Forget trying to educate the population about the dangers of free access to information (which they will encounter anyway). Just go full Orwell! What could go wrong!

Taken straight from the new regulation: “Providers of internet search engine services are not required to implement age assurance measures for end-users who are not account holders.”

How can you argue any of this is NOT in the interest of centralised surveillance and advertising identities for ADULTS when there’s such an easy way to bypass the regulation if you’re a child?

This looks like a voluntary industry code of conduct made by US companies Microsoft, Google etc. I am not aware of any legislation that would require this in Australia. If the commissioner thinks the industry codes are insufficient she might advise the government that a legislative approach is required but she is not an Australian politician and was not elected by anyone here.

The eSafety commissioner is an American born ex-Microsoft, Adobe and Twitter employee who was appointed by the previous conservative government. I wouldn't be so sure her values are representative of the so-called Australian nanny state or the Australian Labor Party.

With search moving from Google & MS to TikTok ET al, is this shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted?

I wonder if technical complexity of implementing online age checks is about the same as implementing a robust direct democracy system - one where people can vote down bad laws instead of outsourcing those decisions wholesale to politicians they don’t even like?..

The co-leads on drafting the code are rather interesting:

> Drafting of the code was co-led by Digital Industry Group Inc. (DIGI), which was contacted for comment as it counts Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo among its members.

Australia's been down this road before with the failed 2019 age verification bill and the Online Safety Act. The technical implementation challenges are enormous - from VPN circumvention to privacy risks of ID verification systems.

Homomorphic encryption and third parties. No need for government eyes to know axiomatically which 100pts ID verified which login, nor website or search engine to know who the real person is.

Most legislation aims to create the offence of misleading, not actually stamp out 100% of offenders. Kids who get round this will make liabilities for themselves and their parents.

ah another one from the series of govt ideas so good that they have to be enforced

I mailed the nanny state if I could comment but the one they provided says nothing.

I’m an Australian who values privacy and civil liberties more than most I meet.

While I yearn for the more authentic and sincere days of the internet I grew up on, I recognize very quickly by visiting x or facebook how much it isn’t that, and hasn’t been for a long time.

I think this bill is a good thing and I support it.

Stupid bipartisan authoritarian bs, so basically a normal day for the australian government.

It's interesting how all countries work in tandem implementing these measures. UK, EU, some US States and now Australia all require or will soon require age verification under certain conditions.

It seems like it would make more sense to implement it at the browser level. Let the website return a header (ala RTA) or trigger some JavaScript API o indicate that the browser should block the tab until the user verifies their age.

Minor’s accounts must also revoke “sign out” functionality in case they see some titties.

Australians are broadly supportive of these kind of actions - there is a view that foreign internet behemoths have failed to moderate for themselves and will therefore have moderation imposed on them however imperfect.

Can’t say I blame them.

This is very simplistic but at a certain point I feel like parents should just be better parents and take responsibility for what their children do online in their home.

Nice to see the ACS implementing their own dark patterns in making the "Close" text in the top right of their full screen pop-up light-grey and thus difficult to find.

/s

As an australian citizen i'm all for it. Look at how the internet and social media has destroyed our current youth and their naivety and sense of emotional security. They all act like they're living in soviet russia at this point and have become so hard and jaded.

Better I give a little bit of pii than some kid grows up too early.

Would you be able to tell the difference if this policy came from a place of compassion?

People need to realize that Australia is a testing ground for laws like this.

https://youtu.be/eW-OMR-iWOE

Freedom and democracy in action.

Do they realise that some of us may be using computers that don't even have a camera, and open source software that could in theory upload any image we like?

age check = identity check

> Search engines will not be required to implement age assurance measures for users who are not logged in to their services, according to the new rules.

…

> Age assurance methods can include age verification systems, which use government documents or ID; age estimation systems, which typically use biometrics; and age inference systems, which use data about online activity or accounts to infer age.

Oh how convenient.

Grand Fascist State Censor Julie Inman Grant strikes again. Another disgraceful loss of privacy for the country defining anglophone technological totalitarianism.

Aims to protect kids online, but it could easily go too far. It covers way more than just search engines—pretty much anything that returns info, including AI tools.

It pushes for heavy content filtering, age checks, and algorithm tweaks to hide certain results. That means more data tracking and less control over what users see. Plus, regulators can order stuff to be removed from search results, which edges into censorship. Sets the stage for broader control, surveillance, and over-moderation. slowburn additions all stack up. digital ID ,NBN monopoly ISP locked DNS servers . TR-069 etc etc. Hidden VOIP credentials. Australia is like the west's testing ground this kind of policy it seams.

What is it with some of the anglo countries and these ridiculous slides into nannying, vaguely repressive surveillance. It's not even much useful for real crime fighting, as the case of the UK amply and frequently demonstrates.

What an awful sad fall for us all, from such lofty heights of possibility for technology, to a seemingly endless age of both humans being exploited and mechanized by technology and governments doing only the saddest most important useless clutching of pearls fear responses that do nothing to coax the world towards better.

Apologies. I'm already pretty morose over the USA Supreme Court allowing age verification, which although claiming to target porn seems so likely to cudgel any "adult" or sexual material at all.

Until recently the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace has held pretty true. The online world has seen various regulations but mostly it's been taxes and businesses affected, and here we see a turn where humanity is now denied access by their governments, where we are no longer allowed to connect or to share, not without flashing our government verified id. It's such a sad lowering of the world, to such absolutely loser politicians doing such bitter pathetic anti governance for such low reasons. They impinge on the fundamental dignity & respect inherent on mankind here, in these intrusions into how we may think and connect.

Links for recent Texas age verification: https://www.wired.com/story/us-supreme-court-porn-age-verifi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397799