Ms Lee Carosi Dunn:

Legislation has been introduced in a number of different countries and different countries are looking at different aspects of this issue. Legislation has also become law in some states in the United States. The state of Maryland has recently passed a law, for example. One of the interesting facts about that law is that it puts the onus on the advertiser to present himself or herself to the platform as a political advertiser looking to provide advertisements of a political nature. That begins a collaboration between the platform and the advertiser. The advertiser will then step in and make sure all of its advertisements are disclosed and that those advertisements have the disclosure on them. That is an item of legislation that is helpful because we want to provide transparency. We think it is good for voters, good for our platform and good for our users. It also helps to have an ongoing dialogue with advertisers seeking to be political advertisers to ensure that we have the disclosure on there.

Deputy Stanley mentioned the idea of territoriality and a foreign entity. One of the processes we are working on in the United States for our transparency tool roll-out for election advertisements is verification of the advertiser. For example, when people in the United States now wish to provide political advertisements online on Google, they need to present themselves with identification. We can then verify that the advertisers are who they say they are in respect of the candidate or political cause. That has been a helpful source for us when we do the disclosures because we are in a position to ensure the disclosures are identifying the correct advertiser.