Latest steps in jointly shaping Europe’s digital future

Supported by the European Data Strategy, the EU is striving to create a digital single market for the data economy and data sharing that benefits society as a whole. This will be based on European data spaces that allow data to flow freely within the EU and across sectors whilst staying true to the EU values of privacy, transparency, self-determination, security and competition. As part of the data strategy’s implementation, the European Commission published its proposal for a regulation on European data governance, known as the Data Governance Act.

The Data Sovereignty Now movement’s new paper “Why we need a Data Exchange Board to im-prove the EU Data Governance Act?” explains why the proposal for the EU Data Governance Act is an essential step forward. The authors of the paper outline suggestions for further elaboration to accelerate the development of a governance framework that will provide true control over personal, business and public data. The following organisations contributed to the paper: INNOPAY, aNew Governance, iSHARE, International Data Spaces Association, Meeco, MyData Global, Sitra and The Chain Never Stops.

Project Director Jaana Sinipuro of Sitra said: “It is great to see how different actors align for European future. Policy makers, cross-sectoral movements like Data Sovereignty Now and large European companies in the Gaia-X initiative are aligning their forces for shaping our digital future. It is important to keep up the momentum. Therefore, we need actions at different levels – think, do and connect. The Data Exchange Boards suggested in the paper will have a crucial role in the im-plementation of regulation and gathering insight from the field so that the future will benefit us all, companies and individuals.

At Sitra, we warmly welcome these different initiatives and hope that a broad and consistent collaboration on soft infrastructure will emerge – standardised functional, legal, technical and operational agreements that make data sharing work in practice. Taken together, data sovereignty (as the guiding principle) and soft infrastructure (as the practical enabler) are crucial for us to achieve the goals of the European Data Strategy.”

The collaboration in writing this paper was carried out as part of Sitra’s IHAN project, which lays the foundations for a fair data economy in which successful digital services are based on trust and create value for everyone.