Ms Sue Duke:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. To answer the question about the resources we have invested in this area, a high volume of content is being uploaded all the time. We have developed a flagging system precisely to allow us to handle the content. Once a report is received, it is sent to a YouTube policy enforcement team. We have multiple teams working around the clock, around the globe, covering all geographical regions and time zones, to make sure that once content is flagged, it is examined and if it violates our rules, it is taken down very quickly.

It is not true to say the Internet is an unregulated Wild West space. What is a crime offline is a crime online and legislation dealing with offline crimes applies equally to online crimes. There are regulations and directives that apply to online transactions and behaviour and, in addition, there are self-regulatory models that companies have come up with at a global level to enforce rules on the Internet. Many companies have a community policing system similar to the one we have developed.

The third point relates to the multi-jurisdictional aspect. We accept that the police force has an extremely difficult job to do. It is a difficult job when looking at crimes across a number of jurisdictions, whether online or offline. There could be an improvement in educating law enforcement agencies on the tools and information available to them in investigating online crime. We started to do this with law enforcement agencies in America and are hoping to extend this work to other jurisdictions, including Ireland. That would go a long way towards informing law enforcement agencies in many jurisdictions of how to tackle these issues and co-operate with other law enforcement agencies where crimes are of a transnational nature.