I guess I will start.
Part of the problem that I see—and I think it's been echoed by some of the other witnesses, who may want to chime in—is that this omnibus approach that has combined both privacy and AI fundamentally really impairs the ability to have an effective review of the legislation as a whole. We are unsurprisingly having much of our discussion on the privacy side, which I understand. That's where the committee was driving, at least initially, but the AI rules are critically important. As we've said, we don't even have the full text associated with them, and the implications are enormous.
To me, the starting point fix for this committee is to say that this is not working the way it needs to work for the committee to do its job effectively. You want to shelve the AI portion altogether for the moment and either go back to the drawing board or say that you're going to conduct two studies or that two committees are going to conduct studies. Perhaps ETHI gets involved. There has to be some sort of mechanism where both of these different pieces of legislation get the kind of attention they deserve.
In terms of the privacy side, very quickly, on this bill, I've highlighted the political party side. I guess I would again emphasize that we will hear, and we do hear, from many of our witnesses that we need to be innovative. We can't be out of step with these things. I have to say that you need to recognize that this is going back to the hearings in the 1990s. We saw the same kind of idea that the sky is falling if you legislate in this way. You saw the same kind of comments being made in Europe when the GDPR was being developed. The reality is that businesses will adapt. They will adopt those rules and, in many instances, find competitive advantage for doing so.
I would urge you, as you go through the bill, to look for where can it be strengthened and where there are some exceptions—we heard today about many of the exceptions that are problematic—but, most fundamentally, recognize that the lens that needs to be brought here is not one of the scare tactics of “You're going to harm innovation in this country”, because that's just the basic playbook on privacy rules. It's rather how we can ensure that we have the best possible law looking a decade or two decades ahead.