Tech Giants Lobby Canberra to Dodge Lawsuits

Google is telling Canberra that Australians shouldn't be allowed to sue it. That's the message in the company's submission to a parliamentary inquiry, where it will give evidence on Monday. The submission argues the Digital Duty of Care Bill "expressly precludes a private right of action" and that compliance should be "evaluated and enforced by a dedicated safety regulator." Translation: let the paperwork bureaucracy handle it, and keep the courtroom door shut.

Who Has the Power

The fight is over who gets to hold a trillion-dollar platform to account. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wants the bill through by the end of the parliamentary year. The US tech industry has protested. Washington's leading tech lobby, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, claims the duty would push social media firms to over-police "borderline" content. The Trump administration has already delivered sharp rebukes of Australian regulation, according to the report.

Google even warned against "speedy changes" to win over the Greens, and said a new legal avenue, if created, should carry a higher threshold of "serious harm" so "courts are not overwhelmed with minor, trivial or vexatious content disputes." It's a neat trick. The company that profits from the content decides what counts as trivial.

Who Gets Crushed

The regulator Google wants as sole enforcer is drowning. Josh Bornstein, now the Australia Institute's director of corporate regulation, put the numbers on the table. "It can't all be left to eSafety, which received more than 100,000 complaints in the last year but only takes action in 2 per cent of cases," he said. That's 98 out of every 100 complaints going nowhere.

Bornstein also noted the bill in its current form refers explicitly only to harm based on gendered violence. "It needs to address other forms of hate speech including racist and homophobic hate speech," he said. "As the royal commission into antisemitism made clear, the most extreme forms of hate speech are propagated by social media giants because they profit from doing so. That has got to stop."

What People Actually Did

More than 80 groups, mobilised by the Australia Institute, are backing a private right of action. They include unions, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Islamic Council of Victoria. Top Jewish and Muslim groups are urging the government to let citizens sue over failures to police online hate based on race or religion. Communications Minister Anika Wells said digital rights groups, consumer rights groups, women's groups and advocacy groups like Teach Us Consent all sought a private right of action. People who've been on the receiving end of the platforms' business model are organising to claim some power over it.

The Reform Trap

The bill's fate sits in a parliamentary bargain. Labor needs the Greens to pass it, and the Greens want tougher rules to discourage doomscrolling, larger fines levied off tech firms' global revenue, and a private right to class actions and lawsuits mirroring the US, where lawsuits have spurred momentum to regulate tech. Labor is examining a private right of action to win that support. Wells promised only to "keep working that through in good faith."

The politics around it is pure theatre. Education minister Jason Clare said the Coalition has taken a hard line on the digital duty since it was burned by free speech advocates over a hate speech debate in January. He blamed "the sort of atomisation of politics and the rise of One Nation," saying the Libs feel like they're subject to "some sort of hostile takeover by Pauline Hanson." Even Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young stressed the rules "are not about individual users at all or stopping people posting certain things." The reform wouldn't outlaw any individual post. It would oblige companies to ensure platforms don't amplify content encouraging attacks on race, religion, sexuality or gender.

So the platforms keep their algorithms and their revenue. The question on the table is whether people harmed by them get a courtroom or a complaint form.