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I have made a submission for the new Australian age verification for internet searches and social media accounts, coming into effect in December this year. Given my lack of trust in the government actually taking this submission seriously, I am publishing it here:

As an IT professional with 30 years of experience, in particular in writing applications for the internet, I would like to make a submission and voice some serious concerns with the new online age verification laws in Australia.

In my experience, people who spend their entire career in the policy-making space rarely understand the technical domain of the internet, and attempts to bar people irrespective of age or creed from certain areas of the internet actually end up having the opposite effect of what was intended by the legislation.

Unintended Ramifications

Teenagers today have internet smarts and technical know-how that adults of previous generations did not have. There is ample technology available for the tech-savvy teen to create new anonymous accounts via means outside of Australia.

Did anyone actually consider that creating this legislation would actually open up black market opportunities for people living outside of Australia to sell access to social media sites in Australia, via the means of creating new accounts in countries not subject to Australian legislation, and then on-selling this as a service to people seeking to circumvent the law here?

The use of VPN is by no means the only alternative available for tech-savvy teens and indeed adults who desire to circumvent the age verification process here in Australia. SOCKS5 proxies are frequently used by Chinese dissidents to break out of the Chinese firewall, and then there is the TOR network that is readily available and well understood.

Apart from implementing a “hard firewall” — like the Chinese, and even that is not 100% impenetrable — there is simply no way for the Australian government to actually implement this new legislation in any meaningful way. Yes, many will comply, but then there is a cohort of teenagers and adults who will be pushed out of the “normal internet” and straight into the darknet, where neither law enforcement nor parents will have any meaningful way of knowing what their siblings are up to. This is what I referred to as this new legislation will have the opposite effect of what politicians aimed at achieving.

When it comes to search engines, roughly 90% of Australians use Google and Chrome as browsers. Has the government considered that there are roughly 50 alternative search engines today? Many of these resell Google searches — without collecting any user data — effectively adding a layer of privacy to the Google search that is not circumventable by legislation.

Take DuckDuckGo, for example. This is a small search engine with a global staff of 300 — compare that to the 180,000 staff in Google, a sizeable percentage of whom work in the search team. DuckDuckGo does not collect any private data; their code is open source and well peer-reviewed.

They currently have no possible means to verify someone’s age as they don’t even know who does the actual search, and given their available resources, they will have only two options available to them. Pull out of the Australian market or defy the Australian legislation.

Given the current hostile relations between the current United States government and our Labor government, I can hardly see how Australia would be able to penalise a company like DuckDuckGo for ignoring any attempt to punish them.

Even if DuckDuckGo pulls out of the Australian market, it’s a walk in the park to use their search engine — or in fact any other privacy-honouring search engine that does not have a business presence in Australia — via an external means such as a VPN.

Tyranny

This legislation flies in the face of the very foundations of our society, our legal system and frankly, over time, the ongoing pursuit of this will make political parties unelectable. The mere idea that one has to “show your papers, please” just to do a search on the internet is a frontal attack on what it means to be a “free person”.

The history of law in the English-speaking world, beginning with charters such as the Magna Carta — now a thousand years old — demonstrates that when rulers demand subservience from citizens, that is akin to tyranny, citizens will eventually say no and demand recourse. The historically inevitable response to this type of incursion will be civil pushback.

The internet currently has ample means — technology such as firewalls, DNS blacklisting, DNS filtering, etc. — available to the home user that would enable a family to sufficiently protect their children from harm, without any need for government intervention at all. This mere fact alone demonstrates that there is a different agenda at play here — namely, one of surveillance and control.

I would ask politicians to reconsider, and have a serious public debate which includes a discussion of how parents (and even schools, for that matter) can sufficiently protect children from online harm.

It’s one thing to attempt to bar children from social media like Facebook, but the sledgehammer approach of forcing adults to “show your papers please” merely to watch a video on YouTube — yes, even videos like how to repair my car — demonstrates to the rationally thinking person that this has gone well beyond an attempt to safeguard children and landed in the realm of “social credit/Chinese-style” surveillance and control.

I expect serious legal ramifications and legal cases to appear should the Australian government continue down this dark road!

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Republished with thanks to Steve Forkin. Image courtesy of Adobe.