Australia’s parliament passed the News Bargaining Incentive on Thursday, closing a five-year argument that began when Meta worked out it could avoid paying for news by simply not carrying any. The new law removes that option. Platforms with a significa…
Meta is running a global campaign to push back against laws that would ban teenagers from social media, according to a new investigation by the Tech Transparency Project. The effort relies on paid influencers and funded parent groups, the watchdog said…
Alphabet priced its first Australian dollar bond on Wednesday at A$5.5bn, about US$3.9bn, roughly 10% more than the market had pencilled in when the deal was trailed at the start of the week. It is the largest corporate bond sale ever done in the Austr…
Alphabet is preparing to sell its first bond denominated in Australian dollars, a modest-sounding piece of financial housekeeping that says a good deal about how the AI build-out is now being paid for. According to bookrunner messages reported by Reute…
Emma Rapaport and Paul Smith reported the markdown for the Australian Financial Review on 14 August. The figure appears two ways and both are correct. It is $7.1bn in US dollars, and A$10bn, which is the number most headlines carried. The cut takes Bla…
Representatives of Meta, TikTok, Google and Snap give evidence to an Australian parliamentary inquiry on Friday, Reuters reported. Regulators and government officials appear too. Meta went first, and it went alone. On Wednesday it published its enforce…
An Australian man named Andrew asked his AI agent to book him into a popular gym class. The agent booked the class. Then it deleted a stranger. The ABC’s national AI reporter Cam Wilson and the Specialist Reporting Team’s Rhiannon Hobbins broke the sto…
Job recruiters are meeting an uncanny new kind of candidate: the AI avatar. These digital humans mirror an applicant’s voice and likeness while being something else entirely, and they are turning up in first-round interviews. Lana Kersanava, a Sydney-b…
We have written about why AI companies are buying up old books: printed before the internet filled with machine-made text, they are a clean source of language, free of AI slop. This is what that hunger looks like from the other end. In Australia, secon…
Most Australian teenagers are still using social media three months after the country’s world-first under-16 ban took effect, according to a new study from the eSafety Commissioner that undercuts one of the government’s flagship online-safety policies….