Australia seeks big tech support for internet safety, AI regulation

Here is the most honest sentence in AI policy this week: 'Australia can't do it alone.' Anthony Albanese said it in Cupertino, of all places — standing in the headquarters of the company he was, in effect, asking to regulate itself, having flown a very long way to do so. Tim Cook presumably nodded the way chief executives nod, warmly and without commitment. The prime minister had come seeking support, per Al Jazeera, and left with the diplomatic equivalent of a firm handshake. There is something almost touching about it.

The new legislation, unveiled this month, is the good part on paper: a 'duty of care' on the firms behind Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, plus a switch that lets users turn their algorithms off. Duty of care is a lovely phrase — it sounds like a legal obligation and behaves like a mission statement. A duty to whom, enforced by whom, at what price, is a question the announcement has thoughtfully left for later. And the algorithm toggle is the policy equivalent of putting a salad on the menu: technically available, engineered to be ordered by nobody. Ask anyone who has ever gone hunting for the 'off' switch in a settings menu at 2am.

Then there is the headline's other half: AI regulation, for which Albanese is seeking big tech's support — a bit like asking the tobacco industry to help draft the warning labels. The structural joke is that these are the same firms whose feeds were built to hold children's attention past bedtime, now recruited as partners in the protection of children. Australia has concluded that the only entities powerful enough to police Meta, TikTok and Apple are Meta, TikTok and Apple, in a voluntary mood. Can't do it alone, indeed — nobody can, which is the entire problem. The flight home, one imagines, is very long.