The Competition Dimension of the European Regulation of Public Sector Information and the Concept of an Undertaking

Abstract

In 2013, the European legislature revised the Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive of 2003. The PSI Directive strives to make information collected by public sector bodies in the framework of their public tasks available for commercial re-use by private undertakings for the provision of added-value information services. Whereas, in 2003, the European legislature aimed to set first incentives to overcome resistance of public sector bodies to make data accessible for re-use, ten years later many Member States have developed open-data policies that are designed to make PSI available to the public free of charge. The revision of 2013 takes account of this evolution by integrating the former re-use policy into a larger open-data policy. This article assesses the evolution of the European framework for the regulation of PSI from a competition-oriented perspective. Thereby, it also critically reviews the Compass judgement of 2012 in which the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) limited the scope of EU competition law to the re-use of PSI by adopting a narrow approach to the concept of an ‘undertaking’.

Keywords: European law; public sector information, competition law, undertaking, open data