Absolutely. Those parallels you point to are absolutely correct. This is about doing business in darkness. Democracy hurts in darkness, as we heard before.
First of all, I want to commend the House for doing this study. You are picking up a task where other parliaments have failed, notably, the European Parliament. Much of what is going on is the capture of our democratic processes and, to some extent, the corruption of our democratic processes. Corruption has a legal meaning and requires substantiating evidence for that. It also has other meanings, if you look at the dictionary, which are about manipulating processes, creating difficulties, etc. That's the way I'm using that word.
What we've seen in the EU are the unacceptable practices of subversion and influence over what is supposed to be democratic decision-making. This has been highlighted by the leading lawmakers involved. That is based on my own, but also on a Corporate Europe Observatory report on this. For instance, the Digital Services Act rapporteur wrote to the President of the European Parliament asking for action to be taken.
In earnest, nothing of consequence has happened. The real reason for that is that, due to a lot of this policy-making in the wider expert community, big tech's influences and subversion practices are in a sense une histoire qui dérange, an inconvenient story to avoid dealing with.
In my view, what needs to be done is to go much further in terms of transparency. Tech regulations today are often understood in terms of enforcing a strict competition regime or rules to keep privacy invading platforms in check. That is not enough. Regulations also need to to be against the tech sector's capacity to influence private institutions, civil society and policy discourse.
This is what I call building an effective tech control system. For instance, in terms of transparency registers, one needs reporting. I would say reporting project by project, euro by euro. Interference strategies need to be systematically monitored and counted.
That's what happened, again, with the push-back against big tobacco. It wasn't—