The Economic Impact of Laws that Weaken Encryption - Executive Summary (English)

The focus of this report is to assess the available evidence of the impact of TOLA on the Australian and global economies. [...] Second, TOLA can harm the brand image of DCPs with operations in Australia that are vulnerable to the threat TOLA poses for the digital security of their products and services. [...] Reduced trust in data security is expected to depress aggregate demand across the digital economy and induce firms to incur higher costs in attempts to offset the harms resulting from the reduction in trust.5 Moreover, since digital technology is used throughout the entirety of the economy, these effects are economy-wide and impact all aspects of how modern businesses operate. [...] Nevertheless, the limited evidence 7 “End-to-End encryption — where the keys needed to unscramble an encrypted communication reside only on the devices communicating — provides the strongest level of security and trust, because by design, only the intended recipient holds the key to decrypt the message” (see scanning/) 4 Le. [...] Although the empirical research supports the overall conclusion of the report, the size of the sample precludes using this as the basis for a more precise quantification of those harms.