Dr. John Evans:

In the division that I am setting up, the platform supervision and investigations division, four of the teams are dedicated to supervision, one is a regulatory operations team and then another one is a major investigations team. The way the four supervision teams are organised is as follows: we have one, at present, dedicated to below threshold platforms, that is, the ones with fewer than 45 million monthly active EU users that are based here. The three other supervision teams are dedicated to the very large platforms. We have shared out the 13 VLOPs or VLOSEs with EU headquarters in Ireland between those three teams.

What they will do is engage with the platforms directly, look at the risk assessments they are required to undertake, manage day-to-day operations and inform us about the kind of risks that different platforms are raising across different kinds of headings, for example, whether there is a threat of harm here related to copyright infringement or whether there is a threat with a particular platform around the access that minors have to it. It depends. What those supervisors will do is help us flesh out that picture. Based on that intelligence, when we marry that with the intelligence coming through the contact centre, we will get a good idea of what our enforcement priorities should be so we can initiate own-initiative investigations as well.