Frustrated by the tech sector’s lack of compliance, the Prime Minister announced sweeping new powers for the nation’s online safety watchdog to wage a technologically doomed war against high schoolers.
CANBERRA — Arguing that Silicon Valley simply isn't trying hard enough to alter the fundamental architecture of the internet, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced Tuesday that the government will drastically increase penalties on social media companies until they figure out how to defeat a teenager who knows how to clear their browser cache.
The strengthened legislation grants Australia’s eSafety Commissioner unprecedented authority to levy multi-million-dollar fines against Meta, ByteDance, and Google for failing to magically ascertain whether a user claiming to have been born on January 1, 1900, is actually a sophomore in Sydney. Under the new framework, the watchdog will have the legal power to aggressively point at California on a map and demand that highly paid engineers invent a digital barrier capable of withstanding a demographic that spends fourteen hours a day looking at screens.
Government data indicates that within six minutes of the original under-16 ban taking effect, the nation's youth seamlessly migrated to offshore virtual private networks, changed their registered birthdates to the day the Titanic sank, and continued posting unimpeded. Albanese stressed that tech giants must now take "proactive steps" to counter this, presumably by rewriting the basic protocols of the World Wide Web to check for digital traces of acne.
We are sending a clear message to Mark Zuckerberg and Shou Zi Chew that they cannot simply throw up their hands when faced with an invincible adversary like an eighth-grader who really wants to watch a TikTok.
Albanese warned that if tech companies do not immediately devise a flawless, privacy-preserving mechanism to verify the exact biological age of a user requesting a data packet, the government is prepared to escalate its enforcement. The Prime Minister stated his cabinet is already drafting an even more sternly worded piece of legislation that a 13-year-old in Brisbane will immediately figure out how to jailbreak.