Ms Alex Cooney:

Australia has chosen to use the language of ban and to bring in a stated age. This brings in the question of age verification and age assurance. It is going to be doing that from November. We are not in favour of a ban as such. We would much rather see safer online practices and children's rights being upheld in these online environments so they can safely benefit from the online opportunities. Clearly, we need to do a lot more. The Internet needs to know it is a child. We need to do a lot more around age verification to ensure that is the case. Ideally, it would not be these companies benefiting further from our data. Rather, there should be trusted third-party solutions offering age verification. There has been a trial in Australia. An interesting report that has come out of that looks at the viability of age verification technology. It is there and has reached the standard that we need.