Ms Lee Carosi Dunn:

I thank the Chairman and committee members for the invitation to participate in today's session. I thank Deputy Lawless for introducing his Bill and for this discussion. I am senior counsel in Google's Washington DC office and head of international elections outreach for the company. I have been with Google for seven years and am familiar with our products and policies related to online advertising and civics information.

The elections outreach team at Google travels throughout the world, educating campaigns, candidates, governments, voters and public policy makers about our tools for reaching and informing voters, in addition to our online security tools.

I am of Irish descent so I am particularly honoured to be here today. I can only imagine what my grandmother, Kelly, would say if she saw me here. She only spoke of clouds and rain in Ireland so I have been very confused during my stay here, on my first visit to Ireland, because of all the sunshine.

I am joined by my colleague Ryan Meade, our public policy and government relations manager for the country, based in Dublin in our Europe, Middle East and Africa headquarters. I am also joined by Ms Jessica Stansfield and Ms Emma Smith, from our office.

We welcome the committee's invitation to discuss the Bill. Over the next five minutes we will share Google's approach to elections outreach and our views on the Bill.

We are encouraged by the detailed scrutiny the committee is carrying out on this Bill, and its engagement with stakeholders is greatly appreciated. Google is committed to making political advertising more transparent so we support the objective of this Bill. We understand the aim of the Bill is to apply the standards of transparency and openness that Irish voters rightly expect to campaigns and political advertising.

We are currently working on tools to provide this transparency to voters in respect of online advertising. We have provided the committee with a short paper that details our observations on the Bill. Those observations are drawn from our global knowledge and experience of political online advertising. Before I address these, it might be useful to share a little of Google’s perspective on elections and the role that online advertising and other digital technologies can play in fostering democracy.

In their 2004 founders’ letter, Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stated, “We believe a well functioning society should have free, abundant, and unbiased access to high quality information.” This is a principle that has guided Google’s work and mission throughout our existence and it continues to do so today. We believe that democracy works better when citizens are informed about the issues that affect them and when they are able to engage with representative government. With this belief in mind, we have built products and programs to organise the world's electoral information. We help voters across the globe engage with democratic processes so that all of their voices can be heard as a government takes shape. Our users ask Google to provide them with accurate, reliable, and comprehensive information. We take this responsibility very seriously. To serve this mission, voters can access information through our products like Google Search and YouTube. Whether helping people to find out how and where to vote, helping them to learn more about candidates and issues or allowing them to use platforms like YouTube to express their political views, our products and tools enable voters to make political decisions and fully engage in the political process.

Today, making information accessible also means protecting it, which is why we created Protect Your Election, a suite of no-cost tools to help protect election-critical websites from digital attacks and email accounts from phishing and hacking attacks, and to educate candidates about countering disinformation online. As a result of the fact that it is so important to be safe online, we also provide digital security training to those most at risk in order that they can learn how to use these tools and identify when they are needed. When it comes to the use of our online advertising products in elections, we have put in place a number of policies to ensure that the privacy of our users is protected. Google strictly prohibits advertisements served to users based on sensitive characteristics such as the user’s health information or religious beliefs. In Ireland and other countries outside of the US, we prohibit advertisements from being served to users based on political affiliation or leaning.

We believe online political advertising helps to democratise elections by making advertising available to all candidates and causes. We believe the legislation must strike a careful balance between the rights of free expression, access to information, data protection, and privacy. It should therefore avoid imposing undue restrictions on the fundamental rights of freedom of opinion and expression. We believe certain provisions in the Bill go further than necessary to achieve this desired objective. For this reason, we have a few concerns about specific provisions of the Bill.

We present five key recommendations on the Bill in our paper. Our first recommendation is that, as Deputy Lawless mentioned, the definitions in the Bill should be clear. A number of definitions in the Bill are framed in broad terms which may give rise to uncertainty and unintended consequences. As such, we are concerned that section 3(1) will have the unintended consequence of placing online platforms in the position of being arbiters of matters of political speech in Ireland by placing the onus of identifying whether an advertisement is directed towards a political end on the platforms. We also suggest further clarity regarding the definition of “bots” and where the liability for their potential use and misuse should lie. We agree and recommend that any new legal framework should also reflect the laws governing online services in the EU, particularly the e-commerce directive, which Mr. Browne mentioned. As a general point we ask the committee to ensure that any legislation is future-proofed by being as technology and platform neutral as possible. We hope the committee will take these points into consideration as it continues its deliberations on the Bill. We believe that these changes will make the legislation more effective and increase clarity as we seek to apply it to our platforms.

When viewed in the wider context, we note that the Bill does not serve as a comprehensive reform of Irish political advertising laws. For example, it does not address the current ambiguity in the law regarding regulation of foreign actors seeking to deliver advertising in Irish political campaigns - something which has been of significant public concern recently. In addition, no regulatory body has been allocated responsibility for ensuring compliance with the Bill's provisions. The committee may wish to consider whether a more comprehensive approach might be better given the number of issues that arise.

We want to assure the committee that Google's engagement with it on this Bill is important. We appreciate being invited to appear. We have been in Ireland for almost 15 years and, as we mentioned, Dublin is our headquarters for our markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. It has grown to be one of our largest headquarters outside North America. We now have 7,000 employees working for Google in Ireland and we are continuing to grow, with hundreds of current job openings here. We are proud of our investment in our team in Ireland. We look forward to continued engagement with legislators whenever we can be of assistance and to working with the committee on the Bill. I thank the committee. We welcome any questions members might have.