It's actually of our own volition. Essentially, it was entirely a voluntary initiative in light of concerns that were raised as a consequence of the U.S. federal election. There were obviously a lot of robust discussions with respect to how to ensure there was enhanced transparency in the course of political advertising. As a consequence, Google, Facebook and a number of the other companies all worked very hard, to be honest, to basically start building out transparency, who gets registries and reports, that would provide our users with much more context in terms of the political advertising they were seeing. This is not just in access to copies of the actual ads themselves, but also contextual information with respect to why it was they may have been targeted, what audience this audit was looking for, how much money that particular advertiser had spent, those kinds of details.
Once this was built for the U.S. mid-terms, there was—as Colin alluded to—a process of learning. We have global teams that build this out and are basically moving from election to election and actually learning from each individual election and improving the processes. Essentially we had a template in place that we were capable of deploying in India, that we were capable of deploying for the EU, that we expect to be deploying in other places. Also, we had individual processes over and above the registry itself. What is the process we use to verify the political advertiser? In the case of the United States, we would verify not only the identity of the advertiser by asking them to provide ID, but we would then also verify that they were authorized to run political advertising with the Federal Election Commission in the U.S.
We have had to adapt that process as we move and implement the registry in other countries because not every election's regulator is capable of providing the kind of validation we had in the United States. So, we're adapting that and learning from those processes as well.
This has been something we have done entirely ourselves versus being compelled by law.