Shane Cassells (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Good afternoon to all our witnesses. If I may turn to RTÉ and Mr. Coveney first, I welcome the second part of RTÉ's Truth Matters campaign, which it launched this week. It is very much welcome in the context of addressing the dissemination of misinformation, which, as we have seen, has been highly important during the pandemic. I note the language RTÉ used this week when it said that young people are turning away from traditional sources of information and that truth can be the first casualty of this. In that respect, we had the major social media giants before the committee yesterday and RTÉ admitted this week that more and more young people are turning towards social media giants for their news content. I put it to the witnesses yesterday that there should be a levy on these giants that take news content, whether from traditional print media or television media, and then get revenue from broadcasting it. There was a big pushback against that suggestion. I would like to hear the opinions of today's witnesses on this. Mr. Esslemont from TG4 touched on this point when he was with us before Christmas.

When there were no social media giants, television benefited mainly from advertising revenue and one could dictate how much the rate card was because of years of figures. Mr. Coveney points in his submission to political ads and claims that social media giants can benefit from them, that such ads are distributed largely through social media and video-sharing applications and that that is of concern to RTÉ. Is RTÉ seeking to level the playing field such that politicians and political ads are not prevalent on social media or is Mr. Coveney saying levelling the playing field should mean that they should be prominent on mainstream media as well?

Finally, Mr. Coveney touched on the issue of advertising flexibility and RTÉ's seeking of same in terms of the minutes allowed. Commercial radio representatives have touched on this as well. I would like to hear the witnesses' views on this.

Turning to Virgin Media and Sky, one aspect of one of the submissions that interested me particularly was the fact that it was stressed to us that it is essential for us legislators to understand that Internet service providers are different in that they do not host content. I noted the analogy that they are like motorways that simply allow traffic to move down the network. Motorways have management companies as well. Motorway crashes do not just happen. If there were no motorways, there would be no cars on them and crashes would not happen. That was an interesting analogy.

Head 56 of the Bill has been pointed to. It is very important to say that the Bill states that it does not imply that services will or will not be designated but gives them the scope further down the line in terms of the avoidance of loopholes. It touches on cloud storage services, online search engines, online gambling services and, yes, Internet service providers. I would like to try to understand the very big pushback. We now see Virgin Media and Sky from a commercial point of view in the world of Internet service providers, getting ahead of the game and realising that that is where things are going. There has been a notable kickback this morning against that provision and I would like to understand that, given that the Bill does not dictate that services will be designated but just provides the scope. Why the kickback, given that we are trying to create online safety?