Australia’s House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs are examining the possibilities of adding identification checks for pornography and online wagering.

Sankaku Complex picked up the news from ZDNet, who reported that the committee was looking into following behind the U.K’s lead of having porn I.D., checks to protect minors from accessing adult content. The U.K., iteration of the porn check never fully materialized after being repeatedly delayed. It was supposed to go live on July 15th of this year but was still staved off after more logistical complications prevented it from going through.

ZDNet quotes from segments of the proposal, writing…

“The committee will look into ‘the potential benefits of further online age verification requirements, including to protect children from potential harm, and business and non-government organisations from reputation, operational and legal risks,’ the terms state. “Potential risks and unintended consequences for age verification will be looked into as well, the terms state, including privacy breaches, freedom of expression, false assurance, and whether adults are pushing into ‘unregulated/illegal environments or to other legal forms of these activities’.”

The measure is being headed up by Senator Anne Ruston, who is the Minister for Families and Social Services, and Paul Fletcher, the Minister for Communications, Cyber Safety, and the Arts. They don’t exactly say how this new identification system will work or whether or not it will only target porn sites or other media sites as well. In the case of the U.K., they exempted social media sites from being affected, such as YouTube, Twitter, Imgur, or Reddit.

Australia, however, has been cracking down on a lot of internet content under the guise of curbing “extremist content” and “hate speech”, which essentially means anything the government doesn’t like. They’ve even jailed people for sharing memes of the Christchurch shooting.

We won’t learn more until the committee offers a report on their findings on October 25th. At that point we’ll find out if they’re going to move forward with the idea or not.

(Thanks for the news tip VersedGamer)

(Main image courtesy of Kunaboto)