Hello and welcome to this M-Lex podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, Senior Correspondent. And joining me for today's podcast is Australasian managing editor James Panicki. Hello James. Hello,

Laurel. James, let's get down to this straight away. We're talking today about tech companies,

but specifically the regulatory onslaught on Silicon Valley unleashed in Australia over the last year

or so. You said in a piece this week that Australia with a small population base and just a handful of

world-class Texas Hess stories of its own appeared likely to remain a footnote on the Asian

balance sheet of the Amazon's, Facebooks and Googles of the world until this recent push from

Australian policymakers and their efforts to create groundbreaking legislation. So tell us where this change

has been most apparent. Okay, well, to make sense of how the regulatory momentum started to build,

you need to go to the digital platforms inquiry. This is the inquiry that the Australian

government directed the country's competition watchdog, the Australian Competition Consumer

Commission, to undertake at the end of 2017. It feels like a lifetime ago, doesn't it?

Now, we've talked about this many times before, so there's no need to go over what has

emerged in the course of the last year and a half.

And by the way, it's not over yet.

I mean, the final report is expected to be handed out, handed down at the beginning of June, I think.

It's actually the end of June.

The end of June.

So there you go.

They extended it.

Just recently delayed. But so for those who haven't followed the earlier coverage on this,

the ACC is looking into the impact of digital platforms at singled out Facebook and Google for

particular attention. And they're looking at the impact on the local media and advertising

...