"I know from speaking with counterparts in Europe and North America, including Canada to the US, they're very much looking at the powers that we have at our disposal," Ms Inman Grant said in Senate estimates.

Since January 2021, the eSafety Commission has had powers to issue sites with takedown notices for harmful content, regardless of whether they are hosted in Australia or not.

Online service providers who fail to comply can face fines of up to $111,000 per offence for individuals and $555,000 for corporations.

Greens senator David Shoebridge asked whether the commission should be emboldened to remove entire sites which were "serial offenders".

He likened it to a "whack-a-mole" situation, which Ms Inman Grant updated to "whack-a-troll".

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"We don't have powers to block entire sites," she confirmed.

The commission's acting chief operating officer Toby Dagg said removal notices were proving to be effective, and had "a high compliance rate", though did not provide figures.

"There are no really good examples internationally of other regulators who possess powers as extensive as eSafety does," he said.

"We've done that most recently, and at a fairly sizable scale during the Buffalo terror attack where we issued a number of notices in respect to pro-terror material, terrorist and violent extremist content," he said.

"So our assessment of those components of the [Online Safety] Act is that they are working."

Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson queried whether platforms such as YouTube were doing enough to prevent the distribution of disturbing content, referring to a video uploaded by the Wieambilla shooters, which remained online for hours.

Mr Dagg said work undertaken by the commission has established "a strong stance in relation to detection of that kind of material proactively".