Thank you very much.

I think it's an excellent question. In reality, what you're pointing to is that, over the two decades during which we should have been regulating these platforms, the biggest corporates and the monopolies in particular, public action has consistently been too little and too late.

I think the fundamental explanation of that is what I was pointing to, which is that big outside vested interests create whole ecosystems of thought influence and subversion that, in the end, manipulate society and policy-making. One gets to the realization of what is happening too late, and when one comes to take action, there are very important counterforces that are at play counteracting the capacity of legislating and regulating.

These actors are so big and, as was said earlier in the hearing, of such a size today—bigger than the GDPs of many G20 countries. Of course, when money is not a limiting factor, you buy or you try to buy everything. That is what we are seeing in terms of lobbying and framing the narrative, but also, as I was pointing to, creating alliances, setting up front groups and astroturfing campaigns. To say it also very frankly, they are influencing or buying think tanks and academics.

We have a very big problem across the western world, not only in Europe, not only in Canada but in the U.S., in Australia and so on and so forth, dealing adequately with the scale of challenge we are facing.

One point was referred to earlier about the independence of academia. I think we are facing a big challenge in terms of having independent academic scrutiny of this. This is a point that has been raised by somebody called Meredith Whittaker, amongst others. She worked for 13 years at Google as head of their open research efforts, and then she left to work on AI ethics. When she was pushed out of the centre where she was working, essentially what she said was that there is virtually no independent academic research on AI ethics across the world.

I think these are examples of the scale of the difficulties we are facing. These companies are systematically, effectively and extensively using their power and their leverage across the policy debate, and that renders regulatory action very difficult.

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