>The tech company have so much power and reach that politicians can only dream to ever attain. Not in Australia they don't. In a nation of 16 million voters t

>The tech company have so much power and reach that politicians can only dream to ever attain. Not in Australia they don't. In a nation of 16 million voters the number of people working for a company that would lose its ability to operate due to this law likely number in the hundreds to perhaps a couple of thousand. Demands from that size/proportion of subsociety can be safely ignored by any government. Additionally, most Australian tech companies deal in either B2B or other types of general management software. They won't be affected by this in the least. >They just need get bigger balls Facebook already has Australia by the balls. They don't need to do anything: - If Australia blocks them, they instantly win because Australian society won't abide being denied access (especially the older segments who now suddenly have time to protest now that the website where they were spending most of their time is gone by government decree). - If Australia has this law on the books, they win because it's harder for a homegrown Australian product to gain marketplace traction under these rules (while Facebook, not being subject to Australian law, doesn't need to obey them, and they're unblockable because of the earlier point- especially because HTTPS ensures that access to Facebook is an all-or-nothing affair). And Australia can't develop a homegrown alternative either, because they simply lack have the skilled personnel to do it; the best ones already left for America, facilitated by a free-trade agreement between the two countries. The US Government has its policy levers to tweak if Australia wanted to renegotiate that deal to stem the bleeding from the brain drain their own policies and societal structure encourage (and they'd have to give up something else anyway).