On 25 November 2020, the European Commission published its proposal for the Data Governance Act (the Data Governance Act). The Data Governance Act will take the form of the regulation and will be directly applicable in all EU Member States.
The Data Governance Act is the first of a set of measures announced in the European Strategy for Data and aims to facilitate access to data available and enable data sharing across sectors and Member States. The European Commission intends to achieve these objectives through provisions in the Data Governance Act that:
- facilitate the reuse of certain public sector data that cannot be made available as open data;
- ensure that data intermediaries function as trustworthy organisers of data sharing or pooling within common European data spaces;
- make it easier for citizens and businesses to make their data available for the benefit of society; and
- facilitate data sharing and enabling the right data to be found for the right purpose.
The European Commission stated that the introduction of the Data Governance Act would allow businesses to benefit from a reduction in costs for acquiring, integrating and processing data and lower barriers to entry, which would enable them to develop new data-driven products and services.
The proposed Data Governance Act will now be considered by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union before adoption. It will become applicable one year after the adoption, and the entities providing data sharing services will have two years after the regulation became applicable to comply with new requirements.
The European Commission press releases are available here and here, and the draft Data Governance Act is available here.
