"This decision will force them to edit their work to account for Australia's restrictive defamation laws," the company said in a statement.

Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association, agreed that online publishers would be much more conservative in the kinds of material they published.

He said the IIA would lobby the federal Government to pass laws providing greater certainty and lower risk to online publishers.

"We want to give greater control back to publishers for their own liability," he said. "If they assess content and publish according to the laws (of their own country), that ought to be good enough."

Glenn Reynolds' editorial on the subject in The Australian:

THE High Court justifies this dangerous position, in part, by reference to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which provides, among other things, that everyone shall be protected from "unlawful attacks on his honour and reputation". But the covenant says far more than that. It also provides that:

1. Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

2. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

The Gutnick decision would seem to put all of this in peril. A rule that subjects internet publication to an unprecedented degree of transnational regulation would seem to make a mockery of the guarantee of communication through "any other media of his choice" as it would place the medium of internet communication at a substantial disadvantage. And a rule that subjects internet publication - the most inherently international kind of communication - to a virtual welter of overlapping parochial national regulation would seem to fly in the face of the guarantee that the right of free expression should be exercised "regardless of frontiers".