I’m planning a submission to Albanese’s productivity summit (official title “Treasury Economic Reform Roundtable). Time is short, so I’d appreciate any comments.
The need for digital sovereignty
The most important source of productivity growth in Australia and elsewhere is the rapid advance of digital technology including “AI” a term used to cover a range of recent developments including Large Language Models. These issues have gained increased urgency with the release of an “Economic Blueprint” for Australia released by Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI, promising substantial increases in productivity if the associated policy agenda is adopted.
This is what ChatGPT came up with when I asked it for an illustration
The potential productivity gains are real, but it would be unwise in the extreme to allow the process to be driven by US-based firms like OpenAI. Yet this is the default outcome unless Australia takes action to assert our digital sovereignty.
Recent developments in the US have exposed the dangers of dependence on foreign and potentially hostile providers for crucial digital services. This dependence is economically damaging and potentially costly as providers increasingly seek to exploit their monopoly power. A number of issues are of concern.
First, we have allowed our government and society to become dependent on for-profit social media services such as X/Twitter and Facebook. Public announcements of all kinds, including emergency service announcements rely on sites like Facebook and X for dissemination. This reliance has become more problematic with the increasingly toxic content of X in particular. Moreover, access to these sites requires an account. The social media ban for people under 16 excludes them altogether and is likely to reduce usage of such sites even after the legal age is reached. Finally, the algorithms” used to promote messages mix vital public information with a wide range of undesirable content in a way that is difficult for users to control.
What is needed here is a public alternative playing the same role as does the ABC with respect to radio and TV. The starting point would be easy enough - a bulletin board on which public service notices could be posted with special placement for urgent announcements. Users would get a feed with notices from the organisations they follow, ranked by urgency then recency. That could be expanded to cover all kinds of sporting clubs and societies (incorporated non-profit associations). The central point would be to reach a position where if necessary, we could force platforms like FB or X to improve their behavior or cease serving Australians.
The feasibility of such an alternative has been demonstrated by new entrants such Bluesky, Substack and the decentralised “Fediverse” of which Mastodon is the most prominent service. While the first two are US-based, they provide a proof of concept.
Next there are the inter-related issues of search and LLM services such as ChatGPT. The emergence of highly problematic AI services such as Elon Musk’s Grok has shown that LLMs are not a neutral technology. Rather the results the produce depend on the choice of algorithms and training sets. The US government can, if it chooses, direct the providers of such services to deliver results which it finds politically desirable. Already, the Chinese-developed alternative, DeepSeek openly declares its loyalty to to government of the People’s Republic of China and produces results reflecting this loyalty
Australia can and should develop independent alternatives to ChatGPT, Copilot and similar US products. The low-cost development of DeepSeek shows that this is feasible.
A further area of concern is the dominance of cloud services by US firms, notably Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Amazon has already responded to European concerns about digital sovereignty with the creation of a European-based “arms length” subsidiary, the “AWS European Sovereign Cloud”. Australia should demand that cloud services operating in Australia should similarly establish Australian subsidiaries. In the long run, the preferred option would be full divestment, with services being provided by independent Australian firms.
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I'm not sure if this will get you dismissed as a Luddite, but what about email? It's quite a socially important service, and relatively technologically simple (spam is the only major challenge), but these days even universities are outsourcing their student email to American firms. Could a government-supplied email address be useful? We're already halfway there with MyGov.
John I really like your idea of anABC style site for information to be placed without contamination.
The ABC responded to the new medium of radio in the 1930s to democratise access and to contribute to culture. When tv came they did the same. So this really continues a proud and successful institution so vital to Australian life.
Leaving ourselves open to the politics and profit driven motivation of overseas companies would be like choosing NBC to direct Australian radio and tv since the 1930s.