Those of us with a libertarian gene (bend, leaning, quirk?) would say the reason governments need at least some measure of transparency built into the law is because of the the power to become completely opaque.
Opacity becomes a measure of the government’s leanings towards totalitarian ideals. – Howard’s coalition was in power long enough to forget that intuitive measure of the quality of government…

My opinion is that Google and the other search engines should be contracted as primary sources for this sort of information.

If there has to be a colloquial Australian source, all that’s needed is a copy maintained within the borders of Australia. Any conflicts will open a healthy and very democratic debate that may prevent future opacities evolving.

Australian researchers and all Australians would have access to both sources.

There is no real difficulty here. As you’ve mentioned many times, regional zoning is already in place; and searches are filtered via IP address, DNS zones (.com vs .com.au, etc.) The process seems like a simple exercise in funding.
Since the advent of Google-Australia, Yahoo7, and NineMSN the storage space is already available configured.

The only reason for chauvinized resources is to control access for Australians to information.
Let the government or military maintain what information is needed as they see fit; as will many large corporations. To assume such information is valuable to the wider range of researchers and the public is to limit the viewport for all Australians.
The larger corporations will have better information anyway.

Australia is a tiny portion of the Internet. No matter what the terms, the value of this country is determined by its relationships with other nations.
Did you know that during the ‘Roaring 20s’, America called itself the Lucky Country? It was an almost identical isolationist rational in both countries.

Paul

As for Google – well, again, that is an interesting question. I’m not sure what their archiving arrangements are: how long they are preserved, how accessible they are, etc etc etc. But again, that is the kind of conversation we should have.

In either case, if you wanted to rely on parties like these, what you need to think about is:

(a) Whether you need an adjunct which is Australian-based and focused on Australian materials, and made accessible to Australians and Australian researchers; and
(b) Whether you need arrangements with the third parties, so that you have both information about their practices (that can be made available to researchers seeking to use the materials) and prior warning of changes to practices.

There are particular difficulties with these issues, I suspect, when it comes to dealing with third parties because of the various issues of commercial/trade secrecy. Government bodies, when they collect information, have to have some measure of transparency. Google and other such third parties do not. That’s why there is increasing interest in the US regarding ’search engine law’ – see here and here.

Maybe the easiest way to answer most of the questions would be for the Deposit Scheme to contract with Google and the Wayback Machine?
Or would that be surrendering to the Evil One?

Paul