Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will start by welcoming Mr. Ansip. From working with people from the Estonian Government over the years, my experience has been that Estonia is a very enterprising country that has very close ties with Ireland. In such circumstances, Mr. Ansip, as an Estonian politician, is very welcome. I agree with his comments on the benefits from advancing this digital single market. I represent a constituency, Dublin Bay South, that is a technology centre, not just home to international companies but also local ones. We have everything to gain in Europe by working together to be technology makers rather than taking from Asia and America, which will end up being the case if we do not work together.

I disagree with my two colleagues. There are different views in the Parliament on the Apple tax issue, but I will not go into the details of that. I will just ask two questions. On tax, does Mr. Ansip believe that - whatever about the retrospective issue - there are now in place tax and transfer pricing rules that allow us to develop e-commerce without that becoming a fundamental difficulty?

My second question is very specific and I do not expect them to get into the politics of it, but our guests would recognise that the possibility of a Brexit has major consequences for the development of e-commerce, particularly in this country, given our Border and our relationship with the UK. Incredibly complex issues immediately come to mind in terms of how we will manage e-commerce with the UK in a Brexit situation, how we will deal with media providers to this country that are based in the UK and also satellite providers - the regulation of which will have to be changed in the event of Brexit - and how we would manage the fact, given that we were talking about cyber security earlier, that everything we do on the Internet is subject to surveillance by the UK Government because of our physical location. My question is not about the witnesses' opinion on what are sensitive issues, but whether the Commission will be able to provide advice for the likes of parliamentary committees such as this, given the technicalities, complexities and all those related issues, when it comes to understanding what is happening in any future negotiations. Can the Commission provide informal advice on some of the technical rules we have to understand if we are to understand the implications of any negotiation process?