Information & Ethics Committee on May 27th, 2019

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

We'll call to order our meeting of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics, and to a larger extent, our international grand committee.

We'd like to welcome especially the visitors from around the globe tonight.

You will notice some empty seats beside you. We've heard of some unexpected flight delays for some of the delegations. They will definitely be here. Some are arriving as we speak. Some are arriving in about an hour from now. Again, my apologies for their not being here as planned.

I'd like to go through, first of all, the countries that are going to be represented tonight, tomorrow and Wednesday. Then we'll go around and have some brief introductions, and get right into the presentations.

We're still expecting some of our witnesses to come, as well.

We'll start off with the countries that are represented, confirmed just today—Canada, of course, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Ireland, Germany, Chile, Estonia, Mexico, Morocco, Ecuador, St. Lucia, and Costa Rica.

I will say that we have lost a few due to something called elections around the globe that we can't really have control over. Those have gotten in the way of some of the other countries being able to get here.

I see some of our witnesses. Mr. Balsillie and Mr. McNamee, please take your seats at the front. We're just getting started. Welcome.

I want to go around the table quickly and have the delegates say their name and introduce the country they're from.

Let's start off with our member from Estonia.

[Keit Pentus-Rosimannus, Vice-Chairwoman, Reform Party, Parliament of the Republic of Estonia (Riigikogu)]

Hello, everyone.

I am Keit Pentus-Rosimannus, representing the Estonian Parliament today.

[Sun Xueling, Senior Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of National Development, Parliament of Singapore]

Hi, everyone.

I am Sun Xueling. I'm the senior parliamentary secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of National Development, from Singapore.

Thank you.

[Edwin Tong, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Law and Ministry of Health, Parliament of Singapore]

Good evening, everyone.

I'm a member of Parliament from Singapore and also Senior Minister of State in the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Law in Singapore.

Thank you.

[Jens Zimmermann, Social Democratic Party, Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany]

Hello.

My name is Jens Zimmermann. I'm a member of the German Bundestag, and I'm the spokesperson on digitalization for the Social Democrats.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I am Charlie Angus, vice-chair of this committee and a member of the New Democratic Party. I represent the constituency of Timmins—James Bay, which isn't a country, but it is larger than France.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

I'm Jacques Gourde, Conservative member for Lévis—Lotbinière.

[Peter Kent, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

I am Peter Kent, the member of Parliament for Thornhill on the northern city limits of Toronto. I am the critic for the official opposition, the Conservative Party, on the ethics committee, which is responsible for ethics, lobbying, information and privacy.

[Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I'm Nate Erskine-Smith. I'm a Liberal member, representing a Toronto area riding called Beaches—East York. I'm the Liberal vice-chair of this committee.

[Raj Saini, Liberal, Kitchener Centre, ON]

My name is Raj Saini. I'm the member of Parliament for Kitchener Centre. I'm a Liberal member. I also sit on the foreign affairs and international development committee.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

I am Anita Vandenbeld. I'm the Liberal member of Parliament for Ottawa West—Nepean, which is about 15 minutes west of here. I'm also on the foreign affairs committee and chair of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights.

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

My name is David Graham. I represent the riding of Laurentides—Labelle, which is a much smaller riding than Charlie's, but it is much bigger than Singapore. I'm on four other committees. In terms of this one, I'm not a regular member but I am a regular member, if you can call it that.

Thank you for this.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you.

I'll finish.

My name is Bob Zimmer, member of Parliament for Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, the beautiful northern British Columbia riding with the Rockies running right through it. I also chair the access to information, privacy and ethics committee that we sit before tonight.

Also, I'll give Mr. Kint some credit today. I gave you some credit earlier. This whole idea of the international grand committee came out of a Washington summit meeting in a pub with me, Mr. Erskine-Smith, Ian Lucas and Damian Collins. That's how it really started. We wanted to do something better—we thought better together as a coalition of countries to work out some solutions to these problems. So I'll give you some credit for probably buying one of the beers that one night. I appreciate that.

Mr. Angus has a comment, and then we'll get into the presentations.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

I'm sorry to interrupt, Mr. Chair, but I just wanted to confirm that our committee, through all-party consensus, issued a subpoena to Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg. I do believe that's unprecedented. I am reading reports that Facebook is speaking to media, saying they're not showing up to our committee. I am not aware whether they have officially responded to the subpoena.

Can you inform this committee whether they have bothered to respond to us on this issue?

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Yes, I've seen similar.... The story, I believe, was on CNN this afternoon. I have not received that, as chair of the committee. Whether they will show up or won't show up.... We've asked the clerk, as well. We haven't received any communication to say they're not going to be appearing tomorrow morning.

My expectation is that we'll have some spaces for them to come and sit and give testimony. Whether or not they choose to fill those is up to them.

Again, it's my hope and expectation that they will follow through with our subpoena and show up tomorrow. That's just my comment back that officially, nothing as chair, nothing as clerk of the committee.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

We'll get right into it tonight. It's a bit more of an informal presentation from our guests tonight, so we won't be asking questions. This is just setting the stage for the next couple of days. It's warming up the conversation on why we're here and why we need to be concerned about big data, privacy and disinformation, etc.

We'll start off with Mr. Kint.

We'll give you the floor.

First, I'll read the list so that you'll know when you're the next to speak, and maybe I'll say who you represent, although you're all here as individuals.

As I said, we're starting with Jason Kint.

Jim Balsillie, chair, Centre for International Governance Innovation.

Roger McNamee, author of Zucked.

Roger, I know your resumé goes a lot longer than that, but we'll keep it short.

Taylor Owen, associate professor, McGill University.

Ben Scott.

Heidi Tworek, assistant professor, University of British Columbia.

Shoshana Zuboff.

Shoshana, I really appreciated your book. It's very informative.

Last but not least is Maria Ressa. She is with us via teleconference.

We're glad you could join us tonight, Maria. I know that you've been in some trying circumstances of late. It would have been nice to have you here, but I understand that that's out of your control.

We'll start off with Jason, and next will be Jim.

Go ahead, Jason.

[Jason Kint, Chief Executive Officer, Digital Content Next]

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before the international grand committee. I am the CEO of the U.S.-based trade association Digital Content Next, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak on behalf of high-quality digital publishers.

We represent about 80 publishers globally. Many of them have offices in your home countries. They include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the BBC, the Guardian, Axel Springer. There are nearly 80 members. To be clear, our members do not include any social media, search engine or ad tech companies. That may be part of why I'm here.

DCN has prioritized shining a light on issues that erode trust in the digital marketplace, including a troubling data ecosystem that has developed with very few legitimate constraints on the collection and use of data about consumers. As a result, personal data is now valued more highly than context, consumer expectations, copyright and even facts themselves.

As policy-makers around the world scrutinize these practices, we urge you, along with industry stakeholders, to take action. We believe it is vital that policy-makers begin to connect the dots between the three topics of your inquiry: data privacy, platform dominance and societal impact.

Today, personal data is frequently collected by unknown third parties without consumer knowledge or control. That data is then used to target consumers across the web as cheaply as possible. This dynamic creates incentives for bad actors, particularly on unmanaged platforms like social media which rely on user-generated content mostly with no liability, where the site owners are paid on the click whether it is from an actual person or a bot, on trusted information or on disinformation.

We are optimistic about regulations like the GDPR in the EU which, properly enforced—that's important, properly enforced—contain narrow purpose limitations to ensure companies do not use data for secondary uses. We recommend exploring whether large tech platforms that are able to collect data across millions of websites, devices and apps should even be allowed to use this data for secondary purposes.

As an example of critically important action, we applaud the decision of the German cartel office to limit Facebook's ability to collect and use data across its apps and across the web. It's a very important decision.

The opaque data-driven ecosystem has strongly benefited intermediaries, primarily Google, and harmed publishers and advertisers. These intermediaries have unique leverage as gatekeepers and miners of our personal data. As a result, issues have surfaced including bot fraud, malware, ad blockers, clickbait, privacy violations and now disinformation, all over the past decade. However, importantly these are all symptoms. Make no mistake, the root cause is unbridled data collection at the most personal level imagined.

It is important to understand the power of these two companies. Four years ago, DCN did the original financial analysis labelling Google and Facebook the duopoly of digital advertising. The numbers are startling. In a $150-billion-plus digital ad market across North America and the E.U., 85% to 90% of the incremental growth is going to just these two companies. As we dug deeper, we connected the revenue concentration to the ability of these two companies to collect data in a way that no one else can. This means both companies know much of your browsing history and your location history. Data is the source of their power. The emergence of this duopoly has created a misalignment between those who create the content and the those who profit from it.

Finally, these data practices coupled with the dominance, without accountability, of these two companies is indeed impacting society. The scandal involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica underscores the current dysfunctional dynamic. Under the guise of research, GSR collected data on tens of millions of Facebook users. As we now know, Facebook did next to nothing to ensure that GSR kept a close hold on our data. This data was ultimately sold to Cambridge Analytica and it was used for a completely different purpose: to target political ads and messages, including the 2016 U.S. election.

With the power Facebook has over our information ecosystem, our lives and democratic systems, it is vital to know whether we can trust the company. Many of its practices prior to reports of the Cambridge Analytica scandal clearly warrant significant distrust.

Although there has been a well-documented and exhausting trail of apologies, it's important to note that there has been little or no change in the leadership or governance of Facebook, Inc. In fact, the company has repeatedly refused to have its CEO offer evidence to pressing international governments wanting to ask smart questions, leaving lawmakers with many unanswered questions.

Equally troubling, other than verbal promises from Facebook, it's not clear what will prevent this from happening again. We believe there should be a deeper probe, as there is still much to learn about what happened and how much Facebook knew about the scandal before it became public. Facebook should be required to have an independent audit of its user account practices and its decisions to preserve or purge real and fake accounts over the past decade. We urge you to make this request.

To wrap up, it is critical to shed light on these issues to understand what steps must be taken to improve data protection, including providing consumers with greater transparency and choice over their personal data when using practices that go outside of the normal expectations of consumers. Policy-makers globally must hold digital platforms accountable for helping to build a healthy marketplace, restoring consumer trust and restoring competition.

Thank you for your time. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss these issues with you today.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Kint.

You've kept very well under your seven-minute time. I'd like to remind everybody that seven minutes is the time allotted, so that was a good job.

Next up is Mr. Balsillie.

[Jim Balsillie, Chair, Centre for International Governance Innovation, As an Individual]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I will take less than that because I will be giving formal comments to the committee tomorrow.

Mr. Chairman and committee members, it's my honour and privilege to testify today to such distinguished public leaders. Data governance is the most important public policy issue of our time. It is crosscutting with economic, social and security dimensions. It requires both national policy frameworks and international coordination.

In my testimony tomorrow, I will give more description, and then I will end with six specific recommendations. I will spend a couple of minutes today speaking to one of the recommendations that I would like to bring forward to the group, which is that you create a new institution for like-minded nations to address digital co-operation and stability.

The data-driven economy's effects cannot be contained within national borders. New approaches to international coordination and enforcement are critical as policy-makers develop new frameworks to preserve competitive markets and democratic systems that evolved over centuries under profoundly different technological conditions. We have arrived at a new Bretton Woods moment. We need new or reformed rules of the road for digitally mediated global commerce, a world trade organization 2.0.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Financial Stability Board was created to foster global financial co-operation and stability. A similar global institution, say, a digital stability board, is needed to deal with the challenges posed by digital transformation. The nine countries on this committee plus the five other countries attending, totalling 14, could constitute the founding members of such a historic plurilateral body that would undoubtedly grow over time.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Balsillie.

Next up we have Roger McNamee. Taylor Owen is on deck.

Go ahead, Mr. McNamee.

[Roger McNamee, Author of Zucked, As an Individual]

I want to thank you for the opportunity to be here.

I come here as someone who has spent an entire professional lifetime involved in Silicon Valley building the best and brightest companies. The core thing I want you to understand is that the culture of Silicon Valley has come completely off the rails and that the technology industry today is committed to monopoly. It is committed to, as Professor Zuboff will describe, a form of capitalism that would be foreign to any of us who have grown up in the last 50 years.

In my mind, the industry has demonstrated that it is not capable of governing itself and that, left to its own devices, it will, as a matter of course, create harms that cannot easily be remedied. As a consequence, I believe it is imperative that this committee and nations around the world engage in a new thought process relative to the ways that we're going to control companies in Silicon Valley, especially to look at their business models.

The core issue that I would point to here, relative to business models, is that, by nature, they invade privacy, and that, by nature, they undermine democracy. There is no way to stop that without ending the business practices as they exist. I believe the only example we have seen of a remedy that has a chance of success is the one implemented by Sri Lanka recently when it chose to shut down the platforms in response to a terrorist act. I believe that is the only way governments are going to gain enough leverage in order to have reasonable conversations.

My remarks tomorrow will go into that in more depth.

I want to thank you for this opportunity. I want you to understand that I will be available to any of you at any time to give you the benefit of my 35 years inside Silicon Valley so you understand what it is we're up against.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you very much, Mr. McNamee.

Next up, we have Taylor Owen, and on deck is Ben Scott.

Go ahead, please.

[Professor Taylor Owen, Associate Professor, McGill University, As an Individual]

Thank you, co-chairs Zimmer and Collins, and committee members, for having me. I have to say it's a real honour to be here with you and amongst these other panellists.

I'm particularly heartened, though, because even three years ago, I think a meeting like this would have seemed unnecessary to many in the public, the media, the technology sector and by governments themselves. However, now I would suggest that we're in an entirely different policy moment. I want to make five observations about this policy space that we're in right now.

The first point I want to make is that it's pretty clear that self-regulation and even many of the forms of co-regulation that are being discussed have proven and will continue to prove to be insufficient for this problem. The financial incentives are simply powerfully aligned against meaningful reform. These are publicly traded, largely unregulated companies, which shareholders and directors expect growth by maximizing a revenue model that is itself part of the problem. This growth may or may not be aligned with the public interest.

The second point I want to make is that this problem is not one of bad actors but one of structure. Disinformation, hate speech, election interference, privacy breaches, mental health issues and anti-competitive behaviour must be treated as symptoms of the problem, not its cause. Public policy should therefore focus on the design and the incentives embedded in the design of the platforms themselves.

It is the design of the attention economy which incentivizes virality and engagement over reliable information. It is the design of the financial model of surveillance capitalism, which we'll hear much more about, which incentivizes data accumulation and its use to influence our behaviour. It is the design of group messaging which allows for harmful speech and even the incitement of violence to spread without scrutiny. It is the design for global scale that is incentivized in perfect automation solutions to content filtering, moderation and fact-checking. It is the design of our unregulated digital economy that has allowed our public sphere to become monopolized.

If democratic governments determine that this structure and this design is leading to negative social and economic outcomes, as I would argue it is, then it is their responsibility to govern.

The third point I would make is that governments that are taking this problem seriously, many of which are included here, are all converging I think on a markedly similar platform governance agenda. This agenda recognizes that there are no silver bullets to this broad set of problems we're talking about. Instead, policies must be domestically implemented and internationally coordinated across three categories: content policies which seek to address a wide range of both supply and demand issues about the nature, amplification and legality of content in our digital public sphere; data policies which ensure that public data is used for the public good and that citizens have far greater rights over the use, mobility and monetization of their data; and competition policies which promote free and competitive markets in the digital economy.

That's the platform governance agenda.

The fourth point I want to make is that the propensity when discussing this agenda to over-complicate solutions serves the interests of the status quo. I think there are many sensible policies that could and should be implemented immediately. The online ad micro-targeting market could be made radically more transparent, and in many cases suspended entirely. Data privacy regimes could be updated to provide far greater rights to individuals, and greater oversight and regulatory power to punish abuses. Tax policy could be modernized to better reflect the consumption of digital goods and to crack down on tax base erosion and profit-sharing. Modernized competition policy could be used to restrict and roll back acquisitions and to separate platform ownership from application and product development. Civic media can be supported as a public good, and large-scale and long-term civic literacy and critical thinking efforts can be funded at scale by national governments, not by private organizations.

That few of these have been implemented is a problem of political will, not of policy or technical complexity.

Finally, though, and the fifth point I want to make is that there are policy questions for which there are neither easy solutions, meaningful consensus nor appropriate existing international institutions, and where there may be irreconcilable tensions between the design of the platforms and the objectives of public policy.

The first is on how we regulate harmful speech in a digital public sphere. At the moment, we've largely outsourced the application of national laws as well as the interpretation of difficult trade-offs between free speech and personal and public harms to the platforms themselves: companies that seek solutions, rightly in their perspective, that can be implemented at scale globally. In this case, I would argue that what is possible technically and financially for the companies might be insufficient for the goals of the public good, or the public policy goals.

The second issue is liable for content online. We've clearly moved beyond the notion of platform neutrality and absolute safe harbour, but what legal mechanisms are best suited to holding platforms, their design and those who run them accountable?

Finally, as artificial intelligence increasingly shapes the character and economy of our digital public sphere, how are we going to bring these opaque systems into our laws, norms and regulations?

In my view, these difficult conversations, as opposed to what I think are the easier policies that can be implemented, should not be outsourced to the private sector. They need to be led by democratically accountable governments and their citizens, but this is going to require political will and policy leadership, precisely what I think this committee represents.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Bob Zimmer]

Thank you, Mr. Owen.

We'll go next to Mr. Scott.