Mr. Jeremy Godfrey:

Yes. I will come to that. The guidelines do have a hook in the obligations. There is an obligation on the very large platforms to assess risks and to mitigate those risks. The guidelines are tied to those obligations so they are guidelines as to how platforms should mitigate the risks. A breach of the guidelines may not in itself be a breach of the DSA but can be indicative of a breach of the obligation to mitigate the risks. I may be talking slightly out of turn because this is the European Commission's competence to enforce but, ultimately, the guidelines are part of the compliance and enforcement mechanism around that obligation to assess and mitigate risks. As I said in my opening statement, the risks specifically include the risks to the integrity of elections and to civic discourse.

Then there are other things. I think there has been quite a bit of discussion about online content that threatens participants in public life or threatens or incites hatred against politicians or other people. Those are separate obligations, although they may be also covered by the guidelines. They are obligations in their own right and ones where we and the Commission both have an enforcement role. I am not saying this will be easy, but the prospect that this could end up with those very large fines is, I think, an incentive for platforms to follow the guidelines or at least, if they do not follow every aspect of them, to be able to explain why. There could be something about the platform or something else it has done that should achieve the same result. I do not think the guidelines will be a complete paper tiger. I think they will be extremely useful. No doubt different platforms will follow them to a different extent, and it will not be just a one-off thing for these elections. It will be a question of continually improving the platforms' compliance performance. These are guidelines as to how to comply with a regulatory obligation. A failure to follow the guidelines, as I said, is not in itself a breach but might be indicative of a breach. That is the mechanism the DSA sets up, so the guidelines are actually issued. There is a specific article in the DSA that empowers the Commission to issue these guidelines, so they are supposed to have a real impact on compliance and on how compliance will be assessed.

You also asked about TV. Within the European Union, TV and broadcast content is regulated on a country-of-origin basis, so we regulate broadcasters based in Ireland and other people in the EU regulate other broadcasters. Of course, wherever they are from, they will have obligations about fairness and balance in their news and current affairs coverage. Apart from broadcasting, video on demand will also come into the regulatory regime, again on a country-of-origin basis. Video on demand can just be streaming but it can also be, as you talked about, a broadcaster that has a channel on a video-sharing platform whereby it uploads a catalogue of content. That can also fall within the ambit of video-on-demand regulation.