Everything Australians put online could be scraped for AI under proposed new rules. How will you be affected?

The Albanese government is "considering" reforms — a verb that in Canberra means we have already decided but would like the news cycle to do the shouting — that would hand US big tech "unrestricted access" to Australian content. Unrestricted is the tell. Not licensed, not negotiated, not metered. Unrestricted. Everything Australians put online, scraped for AI, with the Guardian's headline asking, with admirable politeness, "How will you be affected?" Reader, you will be affected the way a hedge is affected by a strimmer. And the phrase "proposed new rules" is doing the heavy lifting of a government that would much rather you picture a whiteboard than a statute book.

Note the beneficiary. Not Australian labs, not the local research sector, not some plucky Melbourne startup — "US big tech", the same firms who have spent a decade explaining that they cannot possibly pay for the journalism they surface. Now they get the whole country as a training corpus, free at the point of extraction. The word "reform" is doing a lot of lifting there, in the way "reform" always does when the thing being reformed is your privacy and the thing benefiting is somebody's quarterly filing.

And the timing is immaculate. Washington is busy debating frontier safety legislation; New York is drafting rules before its first law has even taken effect; and Australia's contribution to the global conversation is a proposal to let foreign companies hoover up the Australian internet. The consultation, if there is one, will be warm, well-mannered, and scheduled for a time and place engineered for low attendance. The opt-out, if there is one, will be three menus deep and described as a "preference". The AI will be trained regardless, and "how will you be affected?" will be answered for you, in the past tense, by a model that has already read your post.