Ms JULIE BISHOP (9:05 PM) —This Telecommunications Legislation Amendment Bill 2000 is a legislative measure that will bolster, not reduce, the self-regulatory nature of Internet administration in Australia. It is a measure that will both promote competition and consumer protection and secure the future of electronic addressing in Australia. The context in which this bill is introduced is one of an extraordinarily high take-up of technology—particularly Internet-enabled technologies—in this country.

The high growth rate for Internet access in Australia continues unabated. Figures indicate that more than 33 per cent of Australian households have access to the Internet, and that in just the two years to May this year the proportion of adults accessing the Internet increased from some 26 per cent to 46 per cent. In fact, the percentage of Australian adults living in cities and connected to the Internet compares with that of the top 20 US cities according to an online publication from our National Office for the Information Economy entitled Current State of Play—November 2000. Canberra leads the US cities with 62 per cent of the population online compared with 61 per cent in San Francisco. I noted with interest that my home city of Perth was the ninth highest connected city behind Canberra, San Francisco, San Diego, Washington DC, Seattle, Portland, Darwin and Boston, with Sydney and Melbourne ranking 13th and 15th respectively. In OECD terms, Australia ranks consistently among the top three or four—it is always within the top 10—in terms of information and communications technology, expenditure as a percentage of GDP, secure services for e-commerce, Internet multimedia content, PC ownership and the total online population.

Those few statistics put in context the environment in which the measures in this bill are introduced: it is an exploding, exciting time as new technology opens up new frontiers. We have seen, with the introduction of a number of bills in relation to online services—whether it be about classification of content or online gambling—that the Internet phenomenon raises many public policy challenges; and policy making today takes place in this changed commercial environment where the Internet can generate new wealth and create new markets and innovation in production, marketing and sales. Policy makers find themselves at the thorny edges between protection and freedom, between public and private, between competition and mandated monopolies.

This bill will establish an effective safety net for self-regulation by the Internet industry in the area of electronic addressing. We are all familiar with domain names which locate an entity on the Internet. The domain name system is the way that Internet domain names are located and translated into Internet protocol addresses, the unique numerical address. Top level domains are divided into generic and country code—for example, .com, .org—and country codes domains—in our case, .au. In the event that industry administration of the .au country code is not successful or that administration is defective, the Australian government will have the authority under the amended Australian Communications Authority Act 1997 to assume control of .au.

In such an event the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts may instruct the Australian Communications Authority to prepare to assume the role of manager of a specified electronic addressing service—and such an instruction would take the form of a disallowable instrument. In the event that the ACA's preparations were completed, a further ministerial instruction would activate the ACA's statutory responsibility for domain name administration. The bill will also clarify existing provisions in the Telecommunications Act for the ACA to declare a `manager of electronic addressing' and for the ACA and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to subsequently apply directions to that manager—and that is an initiative that will be of significant benefit in fostering competition and consumer protection.

Notwithstanding this safety net, the Australian government supports the quest for a self-regulatory solution to the management of electronic addressing in Australia, including .au, the country code top level domain. It is anticipated that such a solution will in the first instance take the form of the nonprofit company .au Domain Administration or auDA, which was established by the Australian government in 1999 to serve the following purposes: to operate as a fully self-funding and nonprofit organisation; to include, and be accountable to, members of the Internet community; to adopt open, transparent and consultative processes, to enhance benefits to Internet users through the promotion of competition, fair trading and consumer protection; and to establish appropriate dispute resolution procedures.

By way of interest, in June of this year auDA established the Name Policy Advisory Panel, composed of industry professionals, lawyers, academics and corporate representatives, to publicly review domain name allocation rules within the .au domain. Some weeks ago the panel released its public consultation report, including draft recommendations that, firstly, aspirants for a domain name must declare a bona fide intention to use that name for the purpose envisaged by the relevant subdomain: for example, .com.au, or .edu.au; secondly, generic name rules, which prevent the allocation of generic terms as domain names, should be retained and extended to all open subdomains; and, thirdly, the rule restricting entities to one domain name should be removed. I would urge interested persons to visit www.auda.org.au to read the report in full and see how to provide a submission in response.

There has been much reported on the issue of cyber-squatting, the reservation of an Internet domain name for the purpose of selling it on to a company or person who wants to use it, the speculative value being the hope of extracting a premium for the name from an established company or identity. Indeed, the member for Perth raised the issue of cyber-squatting. It will be auDA that will address this important issue of cyber-squatting through its consideration of the most appropriate dispute resolution procedures for the industry. We need only consider the Amazon.com suit in the US Federal Court against Amazon.gr—that is, Amazon.Greece—to appreciate the legal and economic challenges in domain name registration; and I believe that there can be a sensible regime of dispute resolution suitable for the Australian context.

So I make it clear that this legislation is not an intrusion by the Commonwealth of Australia into matters of Internet administration; it is not a measure to deal with cyber-squatters. In addition to the Name Policy Advisory Panel, the Competition Model Advisory Panel is in the process of determining the most appropriate competition model for domain name services, and a report from this panel is due in mid-2001. Before auDA will be given the endorsement of the federal government to take administrative control of the .au domain, significant progress towards the objectives that I have noted will have to have been made. I assume that we all hope that such a transition will be smooth and that the back-up provision that is established in this bill will go unused. I note that this bill has the support of auDA, the support of the Australian Internet Industry Association and the support of Melbourne IT. Accordingly, I commend it to the House.