Professor Brian MacCraith:

I thank the Deputy for his questions. He will appreciate that we cannot give very specific answers because they would divulge our recommendations, some of which have not yet been made in this context. I will shortly ask Professor Doyle to elaborate. We recognise - it was a very significant part of our engagements and consultation - the challenges for the long-term viability of many sectors of the media system because of the absolute takeover of the advertising space by the big tech companies. Senator Cassells spoke earlier about local and regional newspapers, and local and community radio. That is very much to the fore in our deliberations, as is the very important issue of supporting high-quality journalism. So much of what is important in our society and democracy relies on our sustaining and maintaining high-quality journalism. Those issues will form part of our recommendations.

We have looked at the Australian, French and UK models in terms of how one engages with the big tech companies and how one addresses the difficult problem of the use of news content on those platforms. We have discussed issues of the copyright directive, a digital tax and so on. However, we are not at liberty to outline our exact thoughts in this regard, except to say that it is a very important part of our deliberation and has rightly consumed much of our time. I will ask Professor Doyle to give some more specific detail on that.