Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I accept the point made by the Minister. There are situations where it may be allowed but there are also situations that the amendment tries to address, which is around, for example, State access to encryption backdoors. The Minister gave the example of videoconferencing and that is an example of how we are straying into the area of the digital services directive. Is videoconferencing covered by this legislation? Is it part of the remit? Is everything in a videoconferencing environment covered? A whole set of questions arise. I accept that the same regulator will end up acting in these areas. That is fine but the same legislation does not really do the same work.

I am not going to press the amendment because the Minister has made the valid point that there are circumstances where a provider themselves may build in a backdoor, and should be able to do so. That is not what I had hoped to identify. We could make all of our lives much easier by simply providing that there may, in future, be measures in respect of "interpersonal communications service or a private online storage service" but for now they are not covered by all of these provisions in the Bill in the same way. That would be a cleaner way to address this matter rather than us having to fit within an very lengthy and tiring Bill on the AVMS directive, a mini-discussion on the digital services directive. Maybe something that pulls that out might be the best way for us to address that.