How can Openness find its place in the Data Act?

Data has a key role in achieving the objectives of the European Green Deal and in the EU Recovery Plan, given its potential for innovation and job creation, as well as its contribution to the efficiency and international competitiveness of industries across all sectors. The Data Act aims to create fairness in the data economy by addressing the challenges of access to and use of data in specific situations, including B2B and B2G contexts.

Part of the file addresses the unfair market practices and vendor lock-in in cloud services. Moreover, it examines potential policy options to  prevent abuse of contractual imbalances that hinder fair data sharing between businesses and end users.

With its European strategy for data, published on 19 February 2020, the Commission has formulated a vision for the data economy. It will work towards the creation of a Single Market for data, where data flows between countries and sectors, where data is available for use in full respect of European values and rules, and where there are fair, practical and clear rules for access and use of the data. The Data Strategy also underlined that the EU should ensure an open, but assertive approach towards international data flows, based on European values.

Against this background, the Data Act is expected to lay out a regulatory framework for easier cloud switching and model contract terms, complemented by a contractual fairness test for B2B data sharing.

The event will deep dive into the role of openness. Concretely, the discussion will revolve around how the working-methods of the open source community, such as in drafting internationally accepted and respected data sharing licences based on open source principles, can serve as best practices for the European Commission’s policy options on incentivising data sharing. 

Furthermore, the panel will discuss the role of open source for cloud and why it is a fundamental building block for cloud switching, to the benefit of businesses and consumers alike. The role of open standards and open APIs to establish a framework for efficient data interoperability will also be tackled.