Your Internet Provider Becomes Speech Police

You pay your internet provider to connect you to the world. Under Labor’s proposed Digital Duty of Care, that company could find itself under pressure to decide which parts of the world you should be allowed to reach.

The Internet Association of Australia has raised precisely the distinction Canberra needs to hear: supplying internet infrastructure is different from controlling the content travelling across it.

In a paper published on 30 September, the association called for internet service providers to be exempted from the proposed framework. It also expressed disappointment at the department’s lack of engagement on such a significant reform.

That objection takes this debate beyond Facebook’s algorithms and arguments about what Elon Musk allows on X. It reaches the connection serving your home, your business, and your children’s homework.

The exposure draft expressly includes internet carriage services in section 25A. Section 26 requires a safe online environment, so far as reasonably practicable, appropriate management of design features, written risk assessments, and effective measures addressing them.

Section 26A requires providers to identify foreseeable risks from content, features, and systems, assess their likelihood and severity, document responses, and review effectiveness. Assessments are required at least annually and before changes introducing new risks, retained for six years, and supplied to eSafety on request.

Section 26D would let eSafety direct remedial action where it reasonably believes the duty has been breached. The draft permits ministerial exemptions; it does not automatically exempt ISPs.

“Reasonably practicable” weighs available measures, costs, and privacy. Lawful private communications solely between consenting adults are excepted. These limits do not amount to an instruction to block political speech; the concern is the incentive created by imposing this framework on access providers.

Consider the position of a business whose job is to move data. It cannot rewrite somebody else’s article or remove an offending comment from somebody else’s website. Yet it would have to demonstrate that it had assessed risks and taken effective action within its capabilities.

What will its lawyers recommend when leaving access open becomes a potential regulatory liability?

My concern is that filtering and broad access restrictions become attractive ways to demonstrate action, even where those measures inconvenience customers and obstruct lawful material. A provider need not share a bureaucrat’s enthusiasm for censorship to decide that fighting over somebody else’s freedom is a poor commercial bet.

The Institute of Public Affairs has identified this wider danger in its own submission: broad obligations backed by heavy penalties encourage services to impose more restrictive standards than the law strictly requires. It also warns that those standards can spread between interconnected businesses.

That is how censorship can become routine administration. The decision arrives as a compliance measure, drafted by lawyers and implemented by a company whose customers never voted for it.

At the network level, the consequences can be particularly crude. The Internet Society warns that blocking by domain name or internet address can obstruct legitimate services alongside the intended target. Blocking an entire website to suppress a particular page cuts off everything else on that site, too.

Imagine a disputed item appearing among a publisher’s thousands of lawful articles. If a provider responds with a domain-wide block, readers lose the entire publication through that connection. That is an illustration of the technical risk, not a claim that the draft specifically commands that result.

An independent newspaper, a church website, or a political campaign should not have to rely on an access provider deciding that defending its availability is worth the trouble.

The association’s demand for an exemption deserves support. Parliament should clearly exclude the mere provision of internet access from this general duty. Any compulsory restriction on access should require a specific legal basis, a tightly defined target, and a meaningful opportunity to challenge it.

A possible exemption granted later by a minister is no substitute for Parliament drawing the boundary itself.

Nor should households have to fund the compliance machinery through their monthly bills while accepting a narrower internet in return.

The people supplying the connection are warning Canberra to distinguish the network from the material it carries. Parliament should listen before an essential service acquires another role as an instrument of speech control.

We hired our internet providers to connect us. We did not appoint them our censors.

“If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
– George Orwell