We're talking here about third-party information, that is, information that is not ours but which people have filed with us and they claim is commercially confidential.
This is a very dicey thing. On the one hand, you want to disclose as much as possible; on the other hand, you want to have people file in confidence. You don't want them to be reluctant to file because they're afraid you will disclose it and hurt them financially, or hurt them by releasing data that is extremely sensitive in their view.
I think the present system is fine. You could improve it. You could decide that the Information Commissioner rather than the court should make a decision. You could also mandate time periods, as we have done in other pieces of legislation, so that when there is a claim, it goes before the court and people have so many days to file and that a decision should be made in 30 days, etc. So you could take out the delays.
But the basic principle that a neutral third party has to decide whether your claim to confidentiality is legitimate or not is, I think, correct. I wouldn't want to be in a position of deciding a case in which CTV claims something is confidential and I don't think it is, and so we disclose it and hurt them commercially.
By definition, being the regulator, we have a certain point of view, a certain attitude towards these issues; we don't have the neutrality that's required to decide this issue.