2021: It’s Not About the News ~ It’s Techno Politics

My article published in InnovationAus on 5 February 2021.

PDF of the article can be found here.

This is an article on The Australian Parliament Senate Committee Hearings into the proposed News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code.

In years to come, students of history will discover the treasure trove of submissions to the Senate Committee and wonder who actually read them. They will wonder why the submissions of Sir Tim Berners-Lee (“in my capacity as the inventor of the World Wide Web”) and Vint Cerf (“I am one of the original co-designers of the Internet”) appear to have been ignored.

The world is watching, not just because of the potential threat to Google’s business model, but to see how apparently easily the fundamentals of the open web and the digital economy can be compromised by a democratic government appealing to rusted on vested interests and a bureaucracy struggling in the digital era.