Martin Kenny (Sligo-Leitrim, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

One of the points I was going to make on that is we have the existing platforms. If Senator Ó Donnghaile and I were smart enough to create a new app and we put it out there tomorrow morning, we could do whatever we wanted to do. There is no regulation, whereas if we produced any other piece of technology we would have to get a C certification that it meets certain standards. Yet there are no standards to be met. It always strikes me that the Internet is called the worldwide web, WWW, and yet we are talking about what happens here. While Ireland is important, because we have the headquarters of many of the major tech companies here, at the same time it has to have that reach across the globe. While I agree the issue is European from the point of view of the European Union and what we are doing about that, it goes further than that. All of this is happening everywhere from Singapore to Latin America. For instance, when we go on to Facebook or any of these platforms and we scroll down through our content, we come across sponsored advertising all the time. Surely the organisations that are putting out and hosting those advertisements should also be compelled to include a certain amount of advertising about how people can report issues and about how to stand up for one's rights on this platform. A lot of people do not know where to go with reporting issues.