The European Union is proposing legislation that would force more data sharing between companies in Europe – aimed at loosening the hold that some big tech companies have with some commercial and industrial data, officials say.
New rules proposed Wednesday in a bill called the Data Act aim to help smaller companies keep up with larger companies in the race to profit from the trove of non-personal data generated by connected products, from smart devices to automobiles. The issue is increasingly relevant as more devices generate data to be used for control and monitoring, such as in smart homes and factories. The volume of such data will increase with the rollout of 5G technologies.
But big tech companies complain that the bill discriminates against them and would effectively push many companies operating in Europe to store their data in Europe with European providers, rather than sending it overseas or to US companies. to use.
“The Data Act will ensure that industrial data is shared, stored and processed in full respect of European regulations,” said European commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton. The European Commission said it estimated the legislation could add 270 billion euros, equivalent to $305.76 billion to the European economy by 2028.
Wednesday’s proposal is part of the largest proposed expansion of global technical regulation in decades. The European Union is in the final stages of settling on the texts of two new laws aimed at big tech companies, one that seeks to limit potential abuses of dominance and another that aims to force them to take more responsibility for policing online content. is, both supported by significant fines.
From South Korea to the UK to Canada, other laws aimed at large tech companies are being considered or implemented. The US Congress is currently debating proposals that include some of the same provisions to be completed in the European Union.
The new data proposal by Brussels expands on the domain of one of the biggest pieces of technical regulation the European Union has yet come across: the bloc’s privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in 2018. Whereas this law focused on how companies could. —and could not collect personal information about EU residents, the Data Act focuses on non-personal data.
EU officials say their goal with the new law is to help open a market for data by forcing companies to strike data-sharing deals that allow consumers to compete with competing service providers when using connected devices. will allow you to choose between. Many of the provisions will apply broadly beyond just large tech companies.
One example that officials cited was a consumer who wants to send data from a smart dishwasher to a third-party repair service instead of the manufacturer. Another was from a factory owner who wants to share the information collected by the robot with a third-party company that can help optimize its performance. The bill will also introduce a requirement to make it easier for companies to switch between different cloud-service providers.
Lobbyists and industry lawyers said the law would place a significant burden on companies, which must determine how to deal with data requests and what data they are obligated to share. “The economics of data are not regulated until now. It’s definitely going to be a huge compliance burden,” said Christoph Workmeister, partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Derringer.
The act imposes new obligations on so-called gatekeepers, a term that refers to the world’s largest tech companies and which the European Union is still in the process of defining through proposed legislation, called the Digital Markets Act. Is.
The new proposal would force gatekeeper companies to share data collected from their devices and virtual assistants with users and smaller companies only when the user requests that the information be shared. But at least in some earlier drafts of the proposal, gatekeepers are not allowed to request or receive such data, something tech lobbyists say would be discriminatory.
Lobbyists also express concern over provisions that order companies to take measures to prevent governments outside the European Union from accessing any data collected in Europe, which EU officials say is foreign. To counter surveillance. Tech lobbyists argue that the rule, which goes beyond just GDPR rules governing personal information, would create legal uncertainty and discourage trans-Atlantic data sharing.
Foreign access to data in the EU has been a concern in Europe since the US passed a law empowering itself to solicit such data from US companies.
The ability of companies to send personal information belonging to Europeans is already under threat from EU privacy regulators because of an EU court precedent from 2020 also related to government surveillance. Ireland’s privacy regulator said this week that it is in the process of completing an order for Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc. to halt the transfer of user data from the European Union to the US, though any such order would not be official. It can take months to happen.
This story has been published without modification to the text from a wire agency feed
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