Australia wants to raise the possibility of more legislation on technology giants with a new consultation with Reuters

(Corrects typographical errors in the second paragraph)

Author: Colin Packham

CANBERRA (Reuters) – Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Wednesday will announce a parliamentary inquiry into the behavior of the world’s largest technology companies and the need for new legislation. Australia has led global efforts to reduce powers such as Alphabet (NASDAQ 🙂 and Facebook (NASDAQ 🙂 by implementing legislation enacted as a model for others to copy.

Raising the possibility of additional regulation, Morrison said Wednesday that the new research will have a broad scope, but will ask lawmakers to investigate the algorithms used by social media platforms to verify and identify companies and their age. what restrictions are being imposed on them.

“Big technology has big questions to answer,” Morrison will say, according to summaries of his forecast seen by Reuters. “He created these big tech platforms. They are responsible for making sure they are safe.”

Predictions of a new investigation are likely to spark a tension between the Australian government and Facebook, which recently named it Meta, and Google. Earlier this year Australia introduced tough new legislation, prompting two tech companies to pay local media for content, while Canberra has proposed laws that would force people to share the identities of people with anonymous accounts if another person accuses them of defamation. When Australia proposed legislation to force both companies to pay local media for news content, Google threatened to shut down the Australian search engine, while Facebook cut all third-party content from Australian accounts for more than a week. The two eventually struck deals with Australian media companies after offering some changes to the legislation.

The commission in charge of the new investigation will announce its findings by February 15, 2022.