Mr. Ronan Lupton:

I had the privilege of working for Dr. Vinton Cerf. Some of the committee members will know him. Dr. Cerf wrote transmission control protocol/Internet protocol, TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol by which the Internet performs, in the early 1970s. It is the addressing system underneath the worldwide web, which Professor Timothy Berners-Lee was responsible for.

A couple of years ago, Dr. Cerf came to Dublin. I met him in the Shelbourne Hotel for breakfast and we discussed illegal downloads online and image sharing, copyright breaches, etc. Dr. Cerf's idea - it may have developed from this stage and I am conscious of the transcript - was like a land registry for content that would be shared on the Internet.

It is probably ten years since I met him but the suggestion of having flagging reflects where we are now. Ireland cannot lead the way on this, however, because if it did it would cause a big problem in that everything would be moved to Diego Garcia or some such island where it would not be regulated. There has to be groupthink at EU institutional level – I do not mean groupthink in a negative way but in a collective way – to reach the standard. Once we see companies such as Adobe, Microsoft, Google and Meta doing what I am referring to, they will ultimately be doing so for the correct reason, which is to stop child sexual abuse material or illegal content related to children online and terrorist content. Again, these are all parts of the legislative equation I mentioned, namely the 26 or 27 legislative instruments coming from the EU, which ultimately have to be dealt with by video-sharing platforms, technology companies and much smaller organisations that will be regulated by the likes of the Coimisiún na Meán. I hope that is useful.