Information & Ethics committee  Yes, we did.

Information & Ethics committee  Well certainly, they were aware of the tools that we had introduced in the U.S. mid-terms, and essentially they were hoping that with the introduction of the changes to Bill C-76, we would introduce similar tools in Canada. It was really a matter of going through the details about why the specific provisions in Bill C-76 would make this challenging, which is where we had a back and forth.

Information & Ethics committee  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.

Information & Ethics committee  That's correct. I would dispute the characterization that this isn't something that we considered to be an issue. We've been examining this for a while and doing various experimentation with the recommendation system in order to improve the quality of the content the users would see.

Information & Ethics committee  The borderline content policy was introduced earlier this year. That's correct.

Information & Ethics committee  I would agree with you insofar as, when there's a difference between the results that are being served or the result of a passive query versus a proactive recommendation, there's a heightened level of responsibility. With respect to notions of liability, the challenge is that there's a binary that exists in the current conversation between whether you are a publisher or a platform.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. In that case, we are endeavouring, through the process of the recommendation system, to basically provide content that is relevant to what we think the user wants to watch, in a corpus that is much larger than conventional publishers are actually dealing with.

Information & Ethics committee  No.

Information & Ethics committee  While it was being drafted, no, we did not.

Information & Ethics committee  We became aware of the proposed clauses that were being introduced at clause-by-clause at the procedure and House affairs committee, actually when it was reported publicly, at which point we approached the minister's office, first to gather further information, because there wasn't much detail with respect to what those clauses contained, and then to engage robustly with the minister's office to identify some of the concerns we had and to develop proposed amendments that would resolve those concerns.

Information & Ethics committee  In the coming weeks, our decision to not accept regulated political advertising in Canada will be formally reflected in our ads policies. We will continue the process of notifying all affected parties of the change. Similar to other ads categories that we don't accept, the policy will be enforced by a combination of automated systems and dedicated ads enforcement teams, who will undergo rigorous training on the new policy.

Information & Ethics committee  In line with this, we fully support improving transparency in political advertising. Last year we voluntarily introduced enhanced verification requirements for U.S. political advertisers, in-ad disclosures for election ads, and a new transparency report and political ad library for the U.S. mid-terms.

Information & Ethics committee  We are making quality count by identifying and ranking high-quality content in search, news and YouTube in order to provide users the most authoritative information for their news-seeking queries. This includes providing more significant weight to authority as opposed to relevance or popularity for queries that are news related, especially during times of crisis or breaking news.

Industry committee  I basically support that. I flagged in my opening remarks specific information with respect to the exception around artificial intelligence or machine learning, just because it's not clear in the current act if that's permitted. A number of companies and the Canadian government itself have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into basically developing that area and making sure that we as Canadians have a substantial competitive advantage in that area.

Industry committee  I'm happy to provide the full Deloitte economic impact report, which says it's several hundred thousand jobs we've created through these systems.