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.
Speakers
Frank Karlitschek
Founder and CEO of Nextcloud
Frank Karlitschek is a long time open source developer and privacy activist. He contributed to KDE and other free software projects since the end of the 90s and was a board member of the KDE e.V. He managed engineering teams for over 20 years and worked as head of unit and managing director at different internet companies. Over the years he founded several companies and helped startups with management consulting and investments to bootstrap and build successful products. Frank launched several initiatives over the years to make the internet more secure and more federated. Examples are the Open Collaboration Services and the User Data Manifesto. He founded ownCloud in 2010 and the successor Nextcloud in 2016 to create a fully open source and decentralized alternative to big centralized cloud companies. Frank is an advisor to the United Nations and was an invited expert at the W3C to help to create the ActivityPub standard. Frank has spoken at MIT, CERN, Harvard and ETH and keynoted LinuxCon, Latinoware, FASCIA, Campus Party and many other conferences. Currently Frank serves as the founder and CEO of Nextcloud GmbH.
Moderator
