A European Strategy for data

Data is an essential resource for economic growth, competitiveness, innovation, job creation and societal progress in general.

The European strategy for data aims at creating a single market for data that will ensure Europe’s global competitiveness and data sovereignty. Common European data spaces will ensure that more data becomes available for use in the economy and society, while keeping the companies and individuals who generate the data in control.

Data driven applications will benefit citizens and businesses in many ways. They can:

• improve health care
• create safer and cleaner transport systems
• generate new products and services
• reduce the costs of public services
• improve sustainability and energy efficiency

The Commission has proposed a Regulation on European data governance as part of its data strategy. This new Regulation will play a vital role in ensuring the EU’s leadership in the global data economy.

On 23 February 2022, the Commision proposed a Regulation on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data (Data Act). The Data Act is a key pillar of the European strategy for data. Its main objective is to make Europe a leader in the data economy by harnessing the potential of the ever-increasing amount of industrial data, in order to benefit the European economy and society. 

To further ensure the EU’s leadership in the global data economy the European strategy for data intends to:

• adopt legislative measures on data governance, access and reuse. For example, for business-to-government data sharing for the public interest;
• make data more widely available by opening up high-value publicly held datasets across the EU and allowing their reuse for free;
• invest €2 billion in a European High Impact Project to develop data processing infrastructures, data sharing tools, architectures and governance mechanisms for thriving data sharing and to federate energy-efficient and trustworthy cloud infrastructures and related services;
• enable access to secure, fair and competitive cloud services by facilitating the set-up of a procurement marketplace for data processing services and creating clarity about the applicable regulatory framework on cloud framework of rules on cloud.

Businesses will have more data available to innovate as a result of the data strategy. The European Commission has already published a report on Business-to-Government (B2G) data sharing. The report, coming from a high-level Expert Group, contains a set of policy, legal and funding recommendations that will contribute to making B2G data sharing in the public interest a scalable, responsible and sustainable practice in the EU.

Open consultation

The open public consultation on the European strategy for data ran from 19 February to 31 May 2020. The summary report takes stock of the contributions and presents preliminary trends that emerge from them, focusing on quantitative aspects.

The Commission also ran an open public consultation on the Data Act, a key part of the strategy for data. The summary report provides an overview of the contributions. 

Useful links

• European data economy strategy 2018
• Building a data economy – Brochure
• Stakeholder dialogue on building a European data economy
• EU-funded R&I projects on data
• Private sector data sharing
• SME panel consultation — B2B data sharing