Another factor is that we have a government organisation known as the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC - pronounced "ay-triple-cee") which ensures all businesses trading in Australia do so in a fair manner that is not anti-competitive - similar to some of what the US DoJ seems to do, and our ACCC is quite powerful, with the ability to give businesses significant fines for anti-competitive business practices.
The ACCC absolutely hates the way Microsoft and the DVD industry 'region-code' their products, because it reduces a) the number of titles available in Australia, and b) makes those titles that do make it arrive much later. The reasons for this are simple - a smaller market means that it will often be less profitable to make less popular titles available in Australia. The ACCC doesn't necessarily have a problem with this - they're not here to drive people out of business - but given they've actively implemented a system that prevents people from using products they have imported from overseas, they are rather upset at the DVD and gaming industry.
Of course, there is very little that they can do, because it's a global system and the ACCC only has influence in Australia. However, the ACCC will still use whatever influence it has to reduce the capabilities of the system - they were not at all shy about expressing their opinion that if the industry is going to intentionally make their products refuse to work with imported titles, then end-users should be able to do what they want to circumvent the system - and so they back the mod-chippers in court when necessary.
If MS and the rest of the industry removed the region-coding system - therefore making the only use of mod chips as a way of playing copied games - organisations like the ACCC wouldn't oppose anti-mod-chipping legislation.
Whether the ACCC has more political influence than Microsoft can buy/'negotiate' remains to be seen.
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Another factor is that we have a government organisation known as the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC - pronounced "ay-triple-cee") which ensures all businesses trading in Australia do so in a fair manner that is not anti-competitive - similar to some of what the US DoJ seems to do, and our ACCC is quite powerful, with the ability to give businesses significant fines for anti-competitive business practices.
The ACCC absolutely hates the way Microsoft and the DVD industry 'region-code' their products, because it reduces a) the number of titles available in Australia, and b) makes those titles that do make it arrive much later. The reasons for this are simple - a smaller market means that it will often be less profitable to make less popular titles available in Australia. The ACCC doesn't necessarily have a problem with this - they're not here to drive people out of business - but given they've actively implemented a system that prevents people from using products they have imported from overseas, they are rather upset at the DVD and gaming industry.
Of course, there is very little that they can do, because it's a global system and the ACCC only has influence in Australia. However, the ACCC will still use whatever influence it has to reduce the capabilities of the system - they were not at all shy about expressing their opinion that if the industry is going to intentionally make their products refuse to work with imported titles, then end-users should be able to do what they want to circumvent the system - and so they back the mod-chippers in court when necessary.
If MS and the rest of the industry removed the region-coding system - therefore making the only use of mod chips as a way of playing copied games - organisations like the ACCC wouldn't oppose anti-mod-chipping legislation.
Whether the ACCC has more political influence than Microsoft can buy/'negotiate' remains to be seen.