Our courts have a limited jurisdiction and it is just a matter of fact that we can’t enforce our domestic laws outside out borders anymore than an autocracy can suppress foreign reporting of their human rights abuses as much as they may try.

Are you saying this in a “this is how it _should work” way, or in a “this is how it does work” way? Because in the Xitter vs eSafety deal right now, an Australian court has already issued a temporary order to a non-Australian company to block access to something for all visitors regardless of region (not just limited to Australian visitors).

We broadly have two fairly obvious sets of international agreements that can get material taken down through most of the world. The first is child abuse material and the second is IP infringement.

IP law (as I understand it) relies on existing, bilateral agreements - it’s not a unilateral takedown demand from one side because we already agreed beforehand that we’d all have some shared ground in that area. CSAM law I’m less familiar with, but I assume at the very least that relevant laws in most countries are similar enough that what’s illegal for an Australian entity to host would also be illegal for, say, a Canadian entity to host. Maybe there’s also bilateral agreements in place on top of that similar to IP law – again, I’m less familiar with that.

I’m not aware of a parallel for either of these two aspects for the current situation, so I don’t really agree with it being a strawman. I don’t want it to just be a “China bad” thing so instead of saying China / Iran, let’s think about it with friendlier countries. If Canada gets a new government with a small authoritarian streak and they demand a takedown of something from an Australian host using a Canadian law which has no parallel in Australia, isn’t that comparable to what’s going on right now? A country issuing a global takedown just to satisfy their own domestic laws, even when there’s no legal requirement for it within the host country?

I think we could have an argument that on the scale of stuff that should be censored to stuff that shouldn’t, protecting adult victims of violent crime seems like it should fall somewhere between child abuse and IP rights.

I agree with this (and the article) that there’s going to need to be some thinking about where we want our (Australian) laws to handle these situations, but I’m also pretty uncomfortable with global enforcement of domestic laws until we come to agreements with other countries about it (ala IP law). Why was a geo-block considered insufficient? It seems to be enough to satisfy IP law (e.g.) - why not here?