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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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.