Ideas

IndsutriAll: Big data is open data

  • Laurent ZIBELL profile
    Laurent ZIBELL
    18 March 2015 - updated 4 years ago
  • 1 comment
    Total votes: 0

Experience:

Digital platforms exert a monopoly by capturing big data

Many dominant digital-based companies exert a monopoly on their market (e.g. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple iTunes, GooglePlay and App Store, eBay, etc.). This monopoly bears on the distribution platform of the tangible or intangible goods being sold. Access to the end customer of this category of goods is only possible through this platform. It is a "natural" monopoly, due to the technical and cost advantages of size in a network, which favour the largest player and reinforce their dominance on the market. It is also a worldwide monopoly, due to the fact that the Internet eliminates the obstacle posed by physical distance.

Digital platforms control access to the final customer and exert pressure on their suppliers because they capture the “big data” that supports the statistical prediction of customer behaviour.

Ideas:

Any organisation (large or small, private or public) that gathers large amounts of data (and, more specifically, of personal data) in the European Union should be required to anonymise it, and to replicate it into a public, freely accessible, Europe-wide, open data repository, under a common, open standard (e.g. an XML profile) for all to use (e.g. economic, academic, public and non-governmental groups or bodies). Thus, any "Big Data" in Europe would be managed as "Open Data". Personal (i.e. nominative, non-anonymous) data, however, would remain under the strict protection of existing European law. This protection of personal data encompasses both data collected in private life, and data collected in the workplace.

The justification of this regulation is as follows:

  1. The value of "Big Data" lies in its size, meaning that the larger the amount of data, the more value the global community could extract from it. There is a justification, therefore, to ensure the mutual gathering of data between all interested parties, so as to obtain an even larger data set.
  2. This shared resource is a common good, which would thus be legitimately managed by the public authorities to ensure that access to it be fairly provided. It gives serious consideration to what has so far has been little more than an advertising slogan: "Data is the new oil". If so, then it is a public resource, that must be publicly managed for the common good, and for which the public authority has the responsibility to allocate exploitation rights.
  3. By guaranteeing all operators in society open access to the Big Data, this policy ensures that the economic stakeholders are rewarded for their creativity and for the quality and innovativeness of their exploitation algorithms – which is what deserves to be publicly supported – and not for their monopolistic stronghold on the raw material (the data) – for which there is no moral nor economic justification whatsoever.
  4. It allows public scrutiny into the nature of the personal data being gathered by private corporations, and would allow human rights organisations to make sure that this data is indeed being lawfully collected.
Tags: 
platformbig dataOpen Datadata economy

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Céline Deswarte's picture
Céline Deswarte (not verified),
27/04/2015 16:45

Dear Mr Zibell,

Thank you for your detailed contribution to which we would like to respond as to some of its aspects.
While big data and data mining are indeed crucial to enhance progress in research and healthcare provision, such use should be done after a careful analysis of the privacy risks involved and in compliance with applicable data protection rules.
Your proposal for a central data base to be set-up at EU level may raise a series of issues. First, it is far from clear that Member States would support this kind of project. Second, there is a question of competence – the possibility to draw such database at EU level is uncertain and may also raise the question of what should be the law applicable to the data stored and where to store such data. Although pseudonymised, these data may become identifiable in the future due to the rapid pace of evolution of ICT. This is why it is important to remain cautious as to the risks that such a central database could raise to fundamental rights in particular to the right to privacy.
On your concern regarding monopolies over digital platform and the internet, we would like to underline that abuses of dominant positions are sanctioned by EU law under Article 102 of the TFEU – any company targeting the EU market, even on the internet, needs to comply with EU competition rules. On 26 March 2015, the Commission announced an EU enquiry into the e-commerce sector which will look into possible abuse of dominant positions and also announced a specific competition enquiry against Google.
We also would like to emphasise that the Commission supports the unrestricted re-use of open public data for commercial or non-commercial purposes, without the need to make an individual application and if possible without charge, as one of the main tools to boost web entrepreneurship and digital innovation. These principles are laid down in the revised Directive on the re-use of public sector information. Furthermore, the Commission will deploy this year a fully-fledged pan-European infrastructure to federate under one single interface the content published on any of more than 70 European public open data portals at various levels of government. However, the current policy on reuse of public sector information does not concern personal data or data held by private entities.
The Commission aims at creating favourable framework conditions for the data-driven economy. These framework conditions are of both non-regulatory and regulatory nature. Concerning future actions, the Commission could examine restrictions imposed by Member States on the free movement of data within the Union and on unjustified data location restrictions for data storage or processing by using digital technologies such as cloud computing. Another possibility is the development of open international standards and shared technical specifications on file formats, interfaces (APIs) and protocols with the aim of ensuring interoperability of data technologies, cloud systems and services and data portability. Furthermore, the Commission intends to explore the need to address the emerging issues of "ownership" and access to data concerning non-personal data.

Céline Deswarte
Policy Officer
European Commission

Total votes: 0