We should pass strong online-safety rules. We should not pretend that scanning teenagers' Gmail accounts is a side effect rather than the point.
The government's Digital Duty of Care bill is built on a sound instinct: platforms should reduce foreseeable harm before it happens, not wait for takedown notices after the damage. Communications Minister Anika Wells is right that analogy products — food, cars, cots — carry preventive standards. The Senate inquiry now hearing from Google, Meta and TikTok must decide whether private messaging and file storage belong in the same regulatory bucket as algorithmic feeds.
Where the bill overreaches
Google policy executive Rachel Lord told senators that age-assurance clauses written to block pornography could force providers to verify users on Gmail, Drive and messaging backends. The text does not expressly mandate wholesale bans for minors, but it offers no carve-out for school email either. If a platform cannot guarantee an under-18 will never see explicit material in a shared folder, the safest compliance path is exclusion — precisely what critics warn will push young people toward less accountable apps.
Proponents argue platforms are exaggerating. Yet the same week, officials expect tech giants to proactively police harms while explicitly removing privacy as a listed compliance factor. That combination incentivises over-blocking inside inboxes, not measured filtering on adult sites. A duty of care should be targeted; this drafting is a carpet.
What would be proportionate
We support criminalising serious cyber abuse, tightening revenge-porn pathways and giving users an off-switch for recommendation engines — all measures in the package with clearer benefits. Age verification belongs on services whose business model is distributing adult content, not on every cloud sync tool teenagers use for homework. Parliament should amend the bill to state that plainly, with safe-harbour guidance from the eSafety Commissioner.
If lawmakers refuse, they should admit the political trade: slightly lower exposure to harmful material traded for normalising document-based age checks on minors using Australian domain services. That is a legitimate democratic choice only if it is made explicitly, not smuggled through ambiguous harm definitions.
The Senate's task
With the committee due to report on 20 November, negotiators still have time to split preventive duties for social feeds from obligations on private communications. The Greens want tougher penalties; the Coalition wants narrower scope. Both can align on proportionality without gutting the reform.
Australia pioneered plain-packaging tobacco laws because it named the harm and designed for it. Online safety deserves the same precision. Otherwise we risk a law that looks tough in press releases while pushing the next generation of harms into encrypted corners — and leaving every teen without a school Gmail account in the collateral damage.