The two work hand in hand, any new regulation is made WITH those companies, they lobby hard for this stuff, it protects their walled gardens. Do you think Meta and Alphabet didn’t have major influence on the legislation? Yeah governments are terrible but to give corporations a pass on the back ...

Both

Substack is entirely capable of not serving AU.

The platforms do a mighty fine job of restricting speech without assistance from governments. Substack are not required by Australian government to implement age verificationthey - they do it entirely voluntarily and without coercion.