MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA — Australia’s House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill that would ban children younger than 16 years old from social media, leaving it to the Senate to finalize the world-first law.

The major parties backed the bill that would make platforms including TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, X and Instagram liable for fines of up to $33 million for systemic failures to prevent young children from holding accounts.

The legislation passed 102 to 13. If the bill becomes law this week, the platforms would have one year to work out how to implement the age restrictions before the penalties are enforced.

Opposition lawmaker Dan Tehan told Parliament the government had agreed to accept amendments in the Senate that would bolster privacy protections. Platforms would not be allowed to compel users to provide government-issued identity documents including passports or driver’s licenses. The platforms also could not demand digital identification through a government system.

“Will it be perfect? No. But is any law perfect? No, it’s not. But if it helps, even if it helps in just the smallest of ways, it will make a huge difference to people’s lives,” Tehan told Parliament.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the Senate would debate the bill later Wednesday. The major parties’ support all but guarantees the legislation will pass in the Senate, where no party holds a majority of seats.

Lawmakers who were not aligned with either the government or the opposition were most critical of the legislation during debate on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Criticisms include that the legislation had been rushed through Parliament without adequate scrutiny, would not work, would create privacy risks for users of all ages and would take away parents’ authority to decide what’s best for their children.

Critics also argue the ban would isolate children, deprive them of positive aspects of social media, drive children to the dark web, make children too young for social media reluctant to report harms they encountered and take away incentives for platforms to make online spaces safer.

Independent lawmaker Zoe Daniel said the legislation would “make zero difference to the harms that are inherent to social media.”

“The true object of this legislation is not to make social media safe by design, but to make parents and voters feel like the government is doing something about it,” Daniel told Parliament.

“There is a reason why the government parades this legislation as world-leading, that’s because no other country wants to do it,” she added.

The platforms had asked for the vote on legislation to be delayed until at least June next year when a government-commissioned evaluation of age assurance technologies made its report on how the ban could been enforced.

Melbourne resident Wayne Holdsworth, whose 17-year-old son Mac took his own life last year after falling victim to an online sextortion scam, described the bill as “absolutely essential for the safety of our children.”

“It’s not the only thing that we need to do to protect them because education is the key, but to provide some immediate support for our children and parents to be able to manage this, it’s a great step,” the 65-year-old online safety campaigner told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

“And in my opinion, it’s the greatest time in our country’s history,” he added, referring to the pending legal reform.
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SYDNEY — Google and Facebook-owner Meta Platforms urged the Australian government on Tuesday to delay a bill that will ban most forms of social media for children under 16, saying more time was needed to assess its potential impact.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left government wants to pass the bill, which represents some of the toughest controls on children’s social media use imposed by any country, into law by the end of the parliamentary year on Thursday.

The bill was introduced in parliament last week and opened for submissions of opinions for only one day.

Google and Meta said in their submissions that the government should wait for the results of an age-verification trial before going ahead.

The age-verification system may include biometrics or government identification to enforce a social media age cut-off.

“In the absence of such results, neither industry nor Australians will understand the nature or scale of age assurance required by the bill, nor the impact of such measures on Australians,” Meta said.

“In its present form, the bill is inconsistent and ineffective.”

The law would force social media platforms, and not parents or children, to take reasonable steps to ensure age-verification protections are in place. Companies could be fined up to $32 million for systemic breaches.

The opposition Liberal party is expected to support the bill though some independent lawmakers have accused the government of rushing through the entire process in around a week.

A Senate committee responsible for communications legislation is scheduled to deliver a report on Tuesday.

Bytedance’s TikTok said the bill lacked clarity and that it had “significant concerns” with the government’s plan to pass the bill without detailed consultation with experts, social media platforms, mental health organizations and young people.

“Where novel policy is put forward, it’s important that legislation is drafted in a thorough and considered way, to ensure it is able to achieve its stated intention. This has not been the case with respect to this Bill,” TikTok said.

Elon Musk’s X raised concerns that the bill will negatively impact the human rights of children and young people, including their rights to freedom of expression and access to information.

The U.S. billionaire, who views himself as a champion of free speech, last week attacked the Australian government saying the bill seemed like a backdoor way to control access to the internet.
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sydney — Australia’s Indian Ocean territory of Christmas Island will be connected by subsea cable to the northern garrison city of Darwin, a project backed by Alphabet’s Google that Australia says will boost its digital resilience.

Christmas Island is 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) west of the Australian mainland, with a small population of 1,250, but strategically located in the Indian Ocean, 350 kilometers (215 miles) from Jakarta.

The cable announcement comes as the Australian and U.S. militaries upgrade airfields in Australia’s north, where a rotating force of U.S. Marines will be joined by Japanese troops next year.

Google’s vice president of global network infrastructure, Brian Quigley, said in a statement the Bosun cable will link Darwin to Christmas Island, while another subsea cable will connect Melbourne on Australia’s east coast to the west coast city of Perth, then on to Christmas Island and Singapore.

Australia is seeking to reduce its exposure to digital disruption by building more subsea cable pathways to Asia to its west, and through the South Pacific to the United States.

“These new cable systems will not only expand and strengthen the resilience of Australia’s own digital connectivity through new and diversified routes but will also complement the Government’s active work with industry and government partners to support secure, resilient and reliable connectivity across the Pacific,” Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement.

The other partners in the cable project include Australian data center company NextDC, Macquarie-backed telecommunications group Vocus, and SUBCO.

SUBCO previously built an Indian Ocean cable from Perth to Oman, with spurs to the U.S. military base of Diego Garcia, and Cocos Islands, where Australia is upgrading a runway for defense surveillance aircraft.

Although 900 kilometers (560 miles) apart, Christmas Island is seen as an Indian Ocean neighbor of Cocos Islands, which the Australian Defense Force has said is key to its maritime surveillance operations in a region where China is increasing submarine activity.

The new cables will also link to a Pacific Islands network being built by Google and jointly funded by the United States, connecting the U.S. and Australia through hubs in Fiji and French Polynesia.

Vocus said in a statement the two networks will form the world’s largest submarine cable system spanning 42,500 kilometers (26,408 miles) of fiber optic cable running between the U.S. and Asia via Australia.
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ALEXANDRIA, Virginia — The U.S. Justice Department told a federal judge that Google illegally dominated online advertising technology in seeking a second antitrust win against the company. 

The closing arguments in Alexandria cap a 15-day trial held in September in which prosecutors sought to show Google monopolized markets for publisher ad servers and advertiser ad networks and tried to dominate the market for ad exchanges, which sit between buyers and sellers. 

“Google rigged the rules of the road,” said DOJ lawyer Aaron Teitelbaum, who asked the judge to hold Google accountable for anti-competitive conduct and added that Google is “once, twice, three times a monopolist.” 

Another DOJ lawyer, Julia Tarver Wood, compared the case to the Charles Dickens novel A Tale of Two Cities and said U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema had to decide whether to adopt the DOJ or Google version of the state of the ad market. 

Google lawyer Karen Dunn said the DOJ had not met its legal burden and was asking Brinkema to overrule key precedents. “The law simply does not support what the plaintiffs are arguing in this case,” Dunn said. 

She argued the DOJ was ignoring Google’s legitimate business decisions and the robust quality of the online advertising market. The company argues the government had cherry-picked a narrow slice of the online market and did not account for aggressive competition. 

Shares of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, were up 1.4% in afternoon trading. 

Publishers testified at the trial that they could not switch away from Google, even when it rolled out features they disliked, since there was no other way to access the huge advertising demand within Google’s ad network. 

In 2017, News Corp estimated losing at least $9 million in ad revenue that year if it had switched away, one witness said. 

If Brinkema finds that Google broke the law, she would consider prosecutors’ request to make Google at least sell off Google Ad Manager, a platform that includes the company’s publisher ad server and its ad exchange. 

Google offered to sell the ad exchange this year to end a European Union antitrust investigation, but European publishers rejected the proposal as insufficient, Reuters first reported in September. 

Analysts view the ad tech case as a smaller financial risk than the case in which a judge ruled Google maintains an illegal monopoly in online search, and in which prosecutors have argued the company must be forced to sell its Chrome browser.
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