Information & Ethics committee  It was less about the source of the advertising. It was more about our ability to update whoever it is that showed the ad in real time, the information that they showed in a political ad, and then provide them the information and the ad creative they need to update their own registries.

Information & Ethics committee  It depends on the individual practice in individual countries. I'm reticent to comment on the electoral law of other countries that I'm simply not familiar with. I know with respect to our own policies we've applied around political advertising in countries where we've deployed a transparency report, a registry, we've actually been employing similar requirements with respect to advertiser verification and finding means to verify that the advertiser in question was authorized to run political advertising by the local electoral regulator.

Information & Ethics committee  It's simply because the systems we've deployed in the U.S., the EU and India would not have accommodated the specific requirements in Bill C-76. If we had moved forward with that, we would have actually implemented a similar system. We actually have had preliminary conversations with Elections Canada with respect to this, but in the end, it just became clear that with Bill C-76 and the specific requirement that each individual publisher had to maintain its own registry, we would have a very difficult time accommodating the requirements.

Information & Ethics committee  That's correct.

Information & Ethics committee  That's correct, because basically if the ad was displayed at 11:59 p.m., the registry would have to be updated by midnight.

Information & Ethics committee  Again, it's simply because technically it wasn't feasible for us to do that.

Information & Ethics committee  It would have been a challenge for us to re-architect within six months the entire underlying systems that we have for online advertising.

Information & Ethics committee  That was not a calculus that entered into the determinations at all. It was fundamentally down to how we would engage the requirements, whether it was technically feasible for us, given the way our systems currently work, given the time frames and, frankly, our risk tolerance, with respect to what would happen if we ended up getting it wrong.

Information & Ethics committee  It had to do with some of the wording, which was vague. Again, there were the concerns I flagged with respect to the issue of ads, but as well, it was the time frame that would be required to update the registry based on this idea, as stated in the act, that it had to be done within the same day.

Information & Ethics committee  It's actually a combination of all of the above. What's happening is that in order to implement the prohibition, we will be updating our ads policies. As I said, there are entire classes of ads where basically we will not accept the ad, such as cannabis advertising. There's another class of ad that goes through registration requirements.

Information & Ethics committee  To be honest with you, it's not a question I could answer, simply because after examining it seriously, we couldn't match the time frame we had. I couldn't give you an estimate as to how long it would take, or what the resources required would be.

Information & Ethics committee  Primarily because the advertising systems are a bit different, in terms of how the creative is being uploaded to us, how it's stored and how it's managed internally. That's why I said it would be the kind of thing that we would work towards, but we didn't feel comfortable this time around that we could commit to that kind of turnaround time.

Information & Ethics committee  That is in no way a reflection on the relative view of the importance of Canada or local law, in terms of the application of our content identification system. For the benefit of the other committee members who aren't necessarily familiar with it, Content ID is our copyright management system on YouTube.

Information & Ethics committee  Essentially, the main difference, at the risk of getting slightly technical, is that fair dealing in Canada is an exception to infringement. It is a defence that one raises in response to a claim that you have engaged in an act of infringement, so the way that is managed is very different.

Information & Ethics committee  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.