The European Union has taken up the plan to develop a European data market, in which data from large European companies can be exchanged. The goal is to enable innovation and break the American dominance of Amazon, Facebook and Google.
The presentation of this plan will take place on 19 February, but Reuters has already seen the concept. It is, therefore, possible that certain aspects of the plan will change before that date. The European Union believes that it is not a good thing that a handful of tech giants have access to most of the data worldwide. As a result, other companies that want to innovate and grow their business based on data, data science and analytics are in a weaker position.
These tech giants are all US-based companies and that means that European companies have a weaker position. To get out of this stranglehold and become more competitive with the United States, but also with China, Europe now wants to set up a European data market.
“The winners of today will not necessarily be the winners of tomorrow.”
The idea is to now capitalize large amounts of industrial and professional data for technological innovation. The European Union document states that “the winners of today will not necessarily be the winners of tomorrow”.
Means to create this European data market are new rules to make it easier to share data across borders, to develop standards on how data is structured, formatted and stored so that it is more interoperable. They are also looking at how public data can easily be made available for companies to use free of charge. Think of environmental data, but also meteorology, statistics and company data.
Europe is also looking at how certain competition rules can be scraped, which in some cases makes it impossible to share data.
Since last year, the European Commission is working with an expert group to research the data being collected by the tech giants. They also look at how this data is used and shared. Based on this research, there will be examined whether regulation is needed to keep the market open and fair.
At the end of February, it will have to become clear what the exact plan is and which rules the European Union has in mind.
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