Those are excellent questions, Madam Speaker, and I am very happy to answer at least some of them to the best of my knowledge.
A cursory discussion with those on the front lines will tell us that peer to peer is de rigueur. It is the new means by which file sharing and downloading is occurring. It does require working through the networks but that seems to be the favourite way of doing things.
When police attempt to break a cyber network the police are actually finding a lot of mirrors. A lot of sites that come up exist for three hours and then move on. It is a very elusive game.
Does this legislation cover this? Yes and no. It talks about things in generalities but does not get to the specifics. My colleague from Moncton and I discussed this over the past few days. It does not actually get into where I think many of those who are on the front line are actually pointing to as being an area on which we need to focus.
The hon. member talks about Kazaa and Napster and other things. Of course those have been regulated in certain ways. I do not want to get into the issue of music or content, but rather deal with where the infrastructure is that is being used to deliver this information. It makes the job of trying to cover so many angles that much more difficult. I want to focus on this.
ISPs are not just the hosts, those who host websites, for instance Google and others. I am thinking of URLs that are used with hotmail. All of these are now caught by this legislation.
I want the committee members to focus on where the problem exists as it stands today. I do not think this is hot off the press but I also think that we have to be purposeful. We should be asking what we are doing with the information too.
Is it good enough to say we are going after ISPs and URLs? We get the domain names, but how are we prosecuting them? I do not think that question has been answered. It is important that we look at that as well.