The other Australian regulator taking on Big Tech
The ACCC may have led Australia's charge to regulate Big Tech, but Julie Inman Grant is not far behind.
Never before has Australia's government been as eager to regulate Big Tech as it is now. The competition regulator has been investigating digital platforms in some manner since 2017, the Attorney General is reforming privacy, the Minister for Science and Industry is trying to set frameworks for artificial intelligence, and a Senate inquiry is investigating how US digital platforms are disadvantaging local people and companies.
But the speed and impact of work by Julie Inman Grant is hard to match. After working in the government relations branches of companies like Microsoft, Adobe and Twitter, Inman Grant was made Australia's first eSafety Commissioner in 2016, putting her in charge of regulating how people and companies behave on the internet.
Her past year has arguably been Inman Grant's most ambitious yet. She set about putting together binding codes of conduct for tech companies to follow by having the industry come up with their own standards.
Inman Grant rebuffed two of the codes, the Relevant Electronic Services (RES) and the Designated Internet Services codes, decreeing they didn't do enough to diminish the spread of child sexual abuse material and pro-terrorism content. The eSafety Commission will now work with tech leaders to find a middle ground, with sparks at some point likely to fly.
