Information & Ethics Committee on May 9th, 2019

[Jason Kee]

In short, as I covered in my opening remarks, we have advertising systems that serve advertising to third party publisher sites, but we don't have a means of delivering the ad creative and the requisite information to them in real time, which would be required under Bill C-76. There are also the complications with respect to the real-time registry itself, which is why, even for our owned and operated sites like Google Search or YouTube, we also wouldn't be able to comply—at least we didn't feel comfortable we could commit to that.

Finally, there is the additional complication with respect to the inclusion of issue advertising. To be clear, the registries that we have available in other jurisdictions actually do not include issue advertising because, as I said, it is very difficult to cogently identify. Therefore, we were concerned that we would not be able to identify issue advertising for inclusion.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

To summarize then, you were not included in the drafting stage of Bill C-76. You were not consulted by the minister or her staff as this government went forward with Bill C-76 in an effort to determine electoral reform for Canada.

[Jason Kee]

That's largely correct. I should also amend the record. We did have one discussion with the minister's office shortly after Bill C-76 was introduced, to discuss the contours of the legislation as it existed at first reading, before any of the online platform provisions were added and before any registry requirements were added. It was a robust discussion, but certainly at the time, we did not contemplate the introduction of the new provisions, so we didn't cover that. Besides that, there wasn't any engagement.

[Stephanie Kusie, Conservative, Calgary Midnapore, AB]

Sure.

What advice would you give to the next Parliament in regard to this legislation?

[Jason Kee]

As we have basically expressed before the Senate committee and elsewhere, and also to the minister's office, we are fully supportive of and aligned with the idea of increasing transparency in political advertising, and we had intended to actually bring the registry to Canada.

There were a certain number of extremely targeted amendments. Basically, I think it was 15 words we actually changed that would have altered Bill C-76 sufficiently, such that we actually could have accommodated the requirements.

My recommendation, if possible, would be for a future Parliament to look at those recommendations, basically look at the challenges the new provisions added—and it's worth noting, as covered by the CBC, many platforms have also similarly announced that they wouldn't be accepting political advertising because of the challenges the specific revisions are introducing—and to revisit them at that time, to see if there are tweaks that can be made to help alleviate the concerns.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

Next, we'll go to Mr. Dusseault for seven minutes.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am pleased to join this committee today. I have the privilege of returning to this committee, which I had the opportunity to chair for a few years before you, Mr. Chair. I am happy to see faces I have seen in the past.

Mr. McKay and Mr. Kee, you know the influence you have. I am sure you are aware of the influence you have on elections and the information that circulates during elections, which influences voters and, ultimately, their decision. It is in this context that it is important to have a discussion with you about the announcements you have made recently regarding election advertising.

My first question relates to the preamble that other colleagues have made. Other fairly large companies in the market have said that they are able to comply with the Canada Elections Act, as amended. Given the fact that you have made many investments in other countries to make such registries, for example in the United States and Europe, and also the fact that you have invested millions of dollars in certain markets, such as China, to be able to adapt your search engine to their laws—in China, we agree, the laws are very strict, which you know quite well—I have difficulty understanding why Google isn't able to adapt to Canadian legislation like that in preparation for the next federal election.

In your opinion, what makes you unable to adapt to Canadian legislation?

Is it because the rules don't reflect international practices or the way online advertising works? Is it because you can't afford to do it or you just don't have the will to do it?

[Colin McKay]

I apologize, but I'm going to answer in English.

I want to underline that our decision was led by a technical evaluation about whether we could comply. It was not a specific question about the regulatory framework within Canada or our commitment to the electoral process in Canada and helping keep it both informed and transparent.

We are on a path in other countries to implement tools like those described in the legislation, to improve those tools and to work on the back-end technical infrastructure to make those tools more informative and more useful for users as well as for all participants in an election.

We arrived at a very difficult conversation because we were faced with a constrained time frame with amendments to legislation that are very important within the Canadian context and to us as Canadians, both as electors and participants in the electoral process. And we had to make a decision about whether or not we could comply with the legislation in the time frame allowed, and we couldn't. So our compliance was left to not accepting political advertising. It is in no way a reflection of either our corporate or our personal attitude towards Canada's authority and jurisdiction in regulating this space, and it certainly wasn't meant to be a signal about our opinion about the amendments to the Elections Act.

It was very difficult for us, and the decision was driven by the technical challenges and the time frame we were faced with.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

I have a supplementary question about the registry you set up during the American mid-term elections and the one you plan to set up in Europe for the European Parliament.

Are these registries, or are these rules, an initiative by Google, or are they implemented as a result of an obligation imposed by law?

Can you clarify why you are moving forward in the United States and Europe? Are you required to do so, or do you do it on your own?

[Jason Kee]

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.

[Pierre-Luc Dusseault, NDP, Sherbrooke, QC]

In these cases, you are happy to do so because they are your own standards and rules. However, when you have to comply with rules set by others, you are much more reluctant to do so. The decision you have made will ensure that you comply with the act, because, on balance, there will be no election advertising.

Given the time I have left, I would like to address a complementary topic. This is the announcement you mentioned in your introduction, which concerns a channel devoted to the election campaign, intended to compensate somewhat for your decision not to authorize advertising.

I wonder about the transparency of this platform and the algorithms used to distribute the content. What content will be broadcast? You say it's content from authoritative sources, but what does that really mean? Will the public have access to this type of information on the platform in question? Will it have access to the policies used to disseminate content and ensure that all candidates or parties have equitable coverage?

Since it's a decision that obviously belongs to Google, who decides on this coverage? You know the influence you have and can have. Who will determine these policy issues that you will publish on this platform during the campaign?

[Jason Kee]

There are actually two separate discussion points that you raised there.

One is that we keep on saying the word “authoritative”. What do we mean by that? That's a perfectly fair question. It's basically something that informs Google Search, Google News and YouTube as well. We actually have very robust guidelines, about 170 pages of search rater guidelines. We use external search rater pools that evaluate the results that we get to ensure that we're providing results to users in response to queries that are actually relevant to the queries they're looking for and actually from authoritative sources.

By authoritative, we actually rank it based on authoritativeness, expertise and a third classification.... I can send you the information. I'm blanking on it.

It's based on information we get from the search rater guides. As I said, there are pools of them, so as a result it's all done in aggregate, which helps us to surface authoritative information. These are the same signals we use, as I said, to identify this class of information and it tends to weight towards established organizations and so forth that actually do original work. To be clear, we're not evaluating the content of the work. We're just evaluating whether this is a site that's actually expert in the subject that they claim to be.

With respect to the YouTube channel, it's a very different thing. It's a very specific, individualized channel that will be available on YouTube. We did this in the 2015 election. In that instance, we got a third party organization, Storyful, to curate that for us. It isn't done algorithmically; it is actually curated. We will do a similar thing where we will have a third party that will then curate that by pulling in information from various sources.

We will establish with that third party what the guidelines for their inclusion will be, which we will be publishing so people are aware of how information is being included in there. It will be predominantly information on YouTube that is posted by established broadcasters and news organizations that we simply populate into the channel as a singular location for people to see.

All this information would also be available from, for example, the CBC website, National Post and so forth. It would also be available there individually as well.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

Next up, for seven minutes, is Mr. Graham.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you. It's nice to see both of you again.

As you probably know, I'm an early adopter of Google. I've been using Google for a solid 20 years. I think it's a good service, but it's grown massively, and become a very powerful tool. With great power comes great responsibility, so I think it's very important that we have this discussion.

The part of C-76 we're talking about is 208.1, and you want to change 15 words. What were those 15 words?

[Jason Kee]

I can happily give you a copy of the proposed amendments we provided, which might be a little more cogent.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

That would be helpful.

Do you oppose the changes we have on C-76, or do you support the bill, from a philosophical point of view?

[Jason Kee]

Absolutely.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Do you support the use of ad registries in general, not just for politics, but ad registries across the board?

[Jason Kee]

It's something we're looking at. As in the political context, there's obviously a certain urgency to the issues with expected transparency, and so forth. It's something we are examining, in terms of how we can provide increased transparency to our users. In fact, just this week, we announced some additional measures with respect to that.

Colin, did you want to touch on that?

[Colin McKay]

Yes. At our developer's conference, we announced a browser extension for Chrome that allows you to see more detail about what ads you're seeing, where they came from—what networks—and how they arrived on your page. We're building it as an open-source tool, so that other ad networks that are also serving ads to sites and pages you're using can feed that information as well.

The direction we're heading, because we recognize that this is important, is providing as much information as possible for users around why they're seeing ads.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

That leads to my next question. You talk about the technical limitations of implementing C-76, and I'm trying to get my mind around that, as a technical person. I have a fairly good sense of how your systems work, so I'm trying to see where the problem is, in the next five months, with adding the subroutines needed to grok political advertising so that you can actually use it.

If you can help me understand the technical side of things, I will understand it. I'd like to hear what those are.

[Jason Kee]

Certainly. The principle challenge we had was this notion that the registry had to be updated in real time, simply due to the fact that we have a very wide array of advertising systems. People who run campaigns with Google will do search ads, so they show up on your search results. They can be YouTube ads—video—or TrueView. You can skip it, and also display advertising that shows up on third party publisher sites.

In the case of the third party publisher sites, those ads are often being served by third party ad servers. We don't necessarily have immediate access to the creative ourselves. For us to update even our own registry in real time, let alone the registry of a third party that had to maintain their own registry, would be very challenging.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

What if you just have it on your own servers, and not the third party ones?

[Jason Kee]

Then, again, we could do it faster. Currently, real time would still be a challenge, based on our systems, just by virtue of the fact that we'd have to know the ad server, and then be able to update it immediately after that.

[David Graham, Liberal, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

I forget the name of the page, but there's a page on Google where you can see all the data Google has on you. It's an easy page to find, and you can see everything you've ever done that Google knows about, in real time. If you can do that for a person, why can't you do it for an ad?