David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to this report, Influence of international digital platforms. I want to acknowledge the hard work of the chair in pulling this together. It's been a timely review. It's interesting to see this report land in the same week that we've seen the seventh interim report from the ACCC. Both raise very significant and legitimate concerns, particularly about the market power of a handful of platforms that control an increasing part of our life.

The first two recommendations in this committee report should be taken on seriously by this parliament. The first is to have a coherent single regulator. You won't have all the expertise in one place, but somebody, some agency, needs to have the power and the critical mass to take on these huge global players. At the moment, literally trying to find who's responsible for any particular mischief that these platforms are undertaking can be half the struggle, let alone then trying to find a valid regulatory basis upon which to act. As these platforms grow, and as their influence over our lives grows, the need for us to push back and have public interest regulation grows with it. We've seen Europe taking really significant steps in trying to limit market power and put in transparency for these big platforms. If we do nothing else, we should copy what Europe does. It has an effective set of regulations and is a very good starting point for addressing transparency and market power.

When you read this committee report, together with the ACCC report, you realise what a problem we have. The ACCC's most recent report looked at five big platforms. It looked at Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft—of course, Alphabet is Google and Meta is Facebook. The ACCC said that the increasing bundling of services by these big platforms, whether it's artificial intelligence or immersive technologies, those voice assistants that we all use, health and fitness apps, media streaming, linking into our home devices, gaming, our cloud services—those suites of services that we're increasingly using for our daily lives—are all being bundled up in a single platform. That's a problem that was identified in this committee report with this recommendation that I read, and the Greens read, as being a clear direction to this parliament to put some legislation in to unbundle these services.

As both reports make clear, the bundling of services also is a major problem for any kind of competitive market to operation. That bundling happen in a number of different ways. One way in which bundling can be deeply uncompetitive is where there may be a family plan. Someone may have an iCloud plan; a parent buys an iCloud plan for the family, which is used as core data photo storage service for the whole family. Then, when members of that family begin to get economic independence, they are still locked into an iCloud related service and a bundle of services that might be provided out of Apple, or whichever platform has the cloud service that they had as a kid. We see, as well, this bundling of voice assistants linking to our smart devices at home. It's getting to the point where, if you want to pull out of your primary platform, you've got a next-to-impossible task not only of pulling out of, say, your phone provider or pulling away from your internet provider but also of unbundling all of your home devices, unbundling your voice assistant and maybe picking a different entertainment app.

The ACCC has said very clearly that these big market players have a plan. Their plan is to immerse your life in this bundle of services and make it next to impossible for you to choose a competitor. It also said that these services are actively hunting for any emerging competitor and that, as an emerging competitor gets any kind of viable business going, the services are literally sucking them up, purchasing them and subsuming them in these large platforms. Is that the future we want? Do we want a future where huge global platforms—at the moment there are maybe five, but maybe in the future it will be three or two—control so many aspects of our lives? Obviously, that's a dystopian future that we should be pushing against, but it's the future that will happen unless we recognise the need for public interest regulation.

I think those are the two critical key recommendations from this report. Let's have a well-empowered, single—but not sole—regulator with primary responsibility and the statutory powers to force some of these platforms to unbundle and to deliver public interest regulation in this space. Let's do that. And let's recognise that the bundling of services is actually a critical threat not just to market operation in the space but increasingly to the sharing of ideas to the democratic marketplace. Unless we confront that sooner rather than later, we're going to have the next-to-impossible task of unpicking people's lives as they become increasingly immersed in a single platform with all the bells and whistles that are now wrapped around those platforms. I don't want to see a future Australia where what you see, what opinions you get and who you talk to is moderated by a single global corporate entity. I don't want that. The Greens don't want that. I don't think the Acting Deputy President Polley wants that, if I can tell from looking across the chamber! I think that may be something that unites this chamber, in a very strange and peculiar way! But that's the risk, unless we confront that sooner rather than later.

I'll finish with this. We don't have to reinvent the wheel, here. There are unique things about the Australian market. But what we've seen Europe do with those two critical acts that have passed in the last couple of years about transparency, the market and the way in which these large online markets operate in Europe is an excellent starting point for us. We should do that. We should urgently implement privacy reforms that can't wallow for another 12 months. And we should take seriously what both this committee and the ACCC have said to us, which is that these massive global corporate interests should not rule our democracy and should not rule our lives. We have an obligation for public interest regulation in this space. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.