With the foundations to enact the EC’s Data Strategy now in place, building large-scale data assets will be crucial for the EU to attract investment in AI
The Act is a key pillar of the EC’s Data Strategy: The European Commission proposed the Data Governance Act (DGA) in November 2020, months after announcing a Data Strategy to leverage the untapped potential of European industrial data. The strategy foresaw the creation of European data spaces across nine key sectors, so that data could be pooled and made available to businesses. The DGA provides the framework to facilitate the use of that data, and to increase trust in data sharing. Just over a year after the original proposal, the European Council and Parliament found an agreement on the DGA, which now only needs formal approval.
The EU will rely on “data altruism”: The DGA sets up common data spaces in strategic domains, and creates safeguards to use certain categories of public sector data even where it is subject to the rights of others (e.g. personal data, trade secrets, copyright-protected data). In this respect, the DGA will complement the Open Data Directive of 2019, which does not cover such types of data. The Act also creates the figure of “data intermediation services”, which will provide the environment where data can be shared. These intermediaries will be listed in a register and subject to neutrality rules, restricting them from using data for other purposes (e.g. selling it on). Another register will include “data altruism” organisations, recognising the organisations that voluntarily share their data. A voluntary certification scheme will help recognise compliant intermediaries and data altruism organisations.
Scaling up data assets will be crucial for Europe to succeed in AI: Now that the framework has been defined, we are one step closer to seeing whether The European Commission’s approach will work. The DGA creates the conditions for the European single market for data that Commissioner Thierry Breton has been advocating for since taking office. With its recent proposals, such as the AI Regulation, the EC has shown that it wants to continue to set high regulatory standards – but for this approach to be successful, the EU needs to be an attractive market in terms of scale. Should it fail to do so, it could lose important streams of investment to other locations such as the UK, which is pursuing deregulation having left the EU, and looks well placed to attract funding for AI.
Source: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_6428
