My greatest concern is that I know these partnerships were undertaken without an economic analysis domestically. Quite frankly, we don't know. I know as an entrepreneur that they have deeply negative spillover effects on our innovation outputs. You see that this year Canada slid behind Poland in innovation performance, so we're 22nd in the world, and Poland is 21. Once you're out of the top 20, you're not really considered a credible innovation nation. I would tie our performance directly to the fact that we have not created sovereign innovation positive spillover approaches.
To answer your question, I think we rush into these things. I'm directly aware that they're done with no economic analysis involving no experts on their spillovers. I can't imagine that a business would ever do a partnership without a business case analysis. I think the first thing we need to do is start analyzing the innovation effects of these varying partnerships or relationships and use proper economics, not “lobbynomics”.
The second thing is that competition law and privacy law—as I mentioned regarding Estonia, and the EU is doing some very active competition strategies—work very nicely to the benefits of innovation and the economy and citizenship. They can all work positively together if we approach them with an understanding of their true nature.