The European Union will force technology companies to share the data they extract

The European Union (EU) will give the green light this Wednesday to the Data Lawan initiative with which to speed up the flow of data in a secure way, regulate which companies and organizations can access the trail of information that users leave on the Internet and for what purposes they can use it.

Data has become manna for the economy, the oil of the 21st century. With this new regulation, the EU creates a framework that will allow greater volumes of data to be accessed and shared —under a series of rules— between the public administration and the private sector, thus improving the efficiency of the single market. All this, “preserving European rights and values”. The European Comission (CE) points out that the Data Law will generate 270,000 million euros of additional GDP between now and 2028.

Over the past two decades, tech giants —Google, amazon, Manzana, Facebook and microsoft— have illuminated and standardized an economic model based on the extraction of user data. Accessing them has been key to detecting consumer behavior patterns, market trends and even predicting human actions. In the EU alone, this model had a value of 324,860 million euros at the end of 2019, a figure that could skyrocket to 827,089 million in 2025.

Those tech giants have used the data they collect as a competitive advantage. The new law seeks to reverse that position of domain making data from ‘gatekeepers’ like Google also available to the public administration and other smaller companies, which would open up new business opportunities for them. “We don’t want a data monopoly like the one Google has,” he stressed. Angelika Niebler, rapporteur of the law. The same would happen in the case of companies that manufacture devices such as mobile phones or coffee machines, which would have to share this data with third parties.

The call data economy it has transformed society and has spread to multiple productive and strategic sectors such as health, finance, automobiles, energy or agri-food. That is why the new rules will not only apply to technology companies, but to all private and public spheres that feed on them.

How will that affect the users? The measure provides for users to have access to the data they generate, which until now remains in the hands of manufacturers. Thus, they could request the transfer of their data to other cheaper service providers without having to pay for it.

The EC estimates that, between 2018 and 2025, the global volume of data will increase fivefold. This increased flow of data is also intended to unlock the potential of information systems. Artificial intelligence (AI), an increasingly booming technology that Brussels is also regulating.

The law has been months in the making. The first proposal was announced on November 25, 2020; On December 10, 2021, a political agreement was reached between the EU governments and on February 23, the EC presented the final proposal that will be approved this afternoon at the European Parliament from Strasbourg.

However, approval and implementation are different things. The European document states that the owner of the data must be compensated for their transfer and that they cannot be used by third parties to harm their business, but it does not specify what data they must share. It is also unclear how these tech giants will be forced to share information that is essential to their business and their dominance of the digital marketplace. After its approval, the law must enter into force within 15 months, that is, in the summer of 2023.