Comments to the Data Act from the Law and Technology Group of Sciences Po Law School

Abstract

These are comments submitted by members of the Law and Technology Group of Sciences Po Law School to the Proposal for a Regulation of the European Parliament and the Council on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data (“Data Act”), open for open consultation and feedback from stakeholders from 14 March to 13 May 2022.

We welcome the Commission's initiative and share the general concern and idea that data concentration and barriers to data sharing contribute to the concentration of the digital economy in Europe. Similarly, based on our own research we share the Commission’s diagnosis that legal and technical barriers prevent different actors to enter in voluntary data-sharing agreements and transactions.

In general, we believe the Data Act is a good initiative, that will flexibilize some of the barriers that exist in the European market to facilitate the creation of value from data by different stakeholders, and not only those who produce it. In this document, however, we focus on five key clarifications that should be taken into account to further achieve this goal: (1) relieving the user from the burden the “data-sharing” mechanism, as this mechanism may be asking users to act beyond their rational capabilities; (2) the definition of the market as the one for related services fails to unlock the competitive potential of data sharing and might increase concentration in the primary markets for IoT devices; (3) service providers need to nudge users into sharing their data; (4) the difficulty of working with the personal - non personal data binary suggested by the act; and (5) the obligation to make data available to public sector bodies sets a barre that may be too hard to meet and may hamper the usefulness of this provision.

Keywords: Data Act, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Data Market, Data Sharing, European Union, Data Governance