James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Can I ask Mr. Lovett - although I am interested in all views on this - about another old chestnut which is the question of net neutrality, and how we enforce this? How do we aspire to it? This is dual-layered because even if we manage our service providers, and legislate that service providers cannot boost or block particular types or sources of content, social media platforms are themselves adopting a net bias, in that they are promoting sponsored contents and applying their own algorithms as to what bubbles to the top and what does not. Going back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Mr. Lovett eloquently described his original vision earlier on. The power of the web was that sort of randomness, where it was built on meritocracy and random discovery. That, in turn, drove content producers where indigenous content and citizen journalism could come about. Ms Kerr has talked about that as well today. That was the dream, the goal and the utopia of the web at the outset. That has been choked back in two ways. The net neutrality debate rages on. The platform is layered on top of that and is equally filtering material out. For some people Facebook, or Google to an extent, are the Internet. In this context, and with a view to the platforms and the kind of regulation we are discussing today, how do we best manage that? I do not know if we can turn back the clock, and maybe we do not want to completely turn the clock back, but there is a goal from the earlier days of the web that is worth preserving, which is the meritocracy model and that citizen journalism and openness to anyone to have their 15 minutes of fame on whatever channel it may be.