10 ms·

A European Commission proposal to create a single market in data

54 points by ckcheng 7y ago

jorblumesea 7y ago
It feels like Europe tries to regulate their way out of their problems, but the instruments of government are too slow compared to the rapid pace of innovation in China and the US.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  Bureaucrats don’t make the innovations, you cannot innovate fast by having a “fast” government. Dictatorships are very fast, not necessarily very successful. Regulation don’t really matter that much, the US states operate under the same regulations but you don’t have a silicon valley in every state. What EU can do is to enable scale by having a level playing field and market access but even that won’t do anything about the language barriers, so the more successful innovators in EU are those who have good language education(alongside with good science education).
  - zhdc1 7y ago
    They can do a good job at cutting down on open corruption though, which is a large part of why EU grants have such a large effort overhead. The EU in large part is trying to bring up the quality of life in eastern/newer member states. Making sure that grant participants from (insert state here) don't steal a large part of the grant award is a very real challenge.
jowday 7y ago
Their use of the word "data" seems incredibly vague.
perceptronas 7y ago
As an european it is hard to read. Government to offer policies to current businesses `to ensure that markets stay open and fair`. Can there be something more evil than this proposal? There cannot be anything more fair than a free market because it allows competition and is voluntary. Laws described are exactly what makes markets unfair
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  There cannot be anything more fair than a free market because it allows competition and is voluntary. Not when it leads to a monopoly.
  - perceptronas 7y ago
    If there are no government laws preventing from competition popping up - it cannot lead to a monopoly. (I assume monopoly means certain business can sell their goods priced highly and competition cannot enter with lower prices)
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      >If there are no government laws preventing from competition popping up - it cannot lead to a monopoly. Yes, it can. It is called a natural monopoly and it occurs when cost of entry and effects of scale are so large that the most efficient provider of a good or service is a single supplier. Not only do quite a lot of them exist, they're actually the desirable form of business in those cases as they provide goods at the lowest unit cost to the consumer. They need however to be regulated so that they cannot abuse their market power.
      - perceptronas 7y ago
        Excuse my bad definition, I was referring to 'non-natural' monopolies. On the other note, as a consumer I prefer these natural monopolies exist over that they don't. I would rather have an expensive railway than to not have any railway at all. Obviously investors will want their return on investment. Alternatives with lower capital requirements to setup businesses always exist (rail -> bus/trucks, electricity -> solar panels, internet -> 4G or similar solution, and so on.)
        modo_mario 7y ago
        Those railways wouldn't exist without the monopoly of the state bringing em about and we've seen how they operate if privatised in the UK and that's still regulated and not even a monopoly. It's shit. Similarly I don't want to see roads privatised because it leads to incredible inefficiency and the open access to the roads provides immense value to the rest of the free market.
lifeisstillgood 7y ago
>>> Competitors such as China and the U.S. are already innovating quickly and projecting their concepts of data access and use across the globe,” it said. Wait what? The EU's GDPR is seen as a globally leading "concept of data access and use". Several US states are putting something like it into place, and hoping to get Federal buy in. China, yeah DGAF, but saying "we are behind other governments on data and privacy" seems ... odd. What do they mean then? Is this just a "single market or bust" thing?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
kachurovskiy 7y ago
Did someone read the actual proposal? Article doesn't make sense: free access to some data sets and remove competition rules to improve competition? Hope it's not another incumbent lobby group carving I better deal for themselves.
- avocado4 7y ago
  There's no specifics mentioned in that article, other than new commons data standards across the industries (good idea IMO).
- thepangolino 7y ago
  The more time goes, the more I’m disappointed at how out of touch with reality EU legislation is when it comes to technology related issues. I still don’t get why the EU Cookie law put the burden on websites instead of forcing browsers to offer better, more accessible cookie management.
  - tomatocracy 7y ago
    The same is true for other non-tech fields. For example, MiFID 2.
unnouinceput 7y ago
Not gonna put a single dent in FAANG. Humans love centralization, we don't like to have things scattered around. It's in our nature, hence there will always be FAANG companies that will have more data than everyone else. Best case scenario EU will have some centralization on their own where people will come and give data there which will achieve nothing more than having EU joining FAANG club. Worse case scenario? EU will implement same stuff like China with their great firewall continuing the current trend to have Splinternet instead of Internet
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > Humans love centralization, we don't like to have things scattered around. It's in our nature Do you have any proof to back this up? And especially how a desire for tidiness in our daily lives would translate to large scale societal centralization? My strong suspicion is that things are centralized because of the nature of modern/neoliberal capitalism, not human nature. By the same token you could say that human nature made the Soviet Union centralized - we all saw how that went in the end...
  - unnouinceput 7y ago
    Proof? Let's see. Didn't your grandparents kept all photos in one place? Didn't your parents send you to same school as all other kids in your street? Didn't you went to same dancing places like your friends when you started sniffing for girls (I'm assuming you're male, reverse the gender otherwise)? Don't you keep your tools in same box(es)? Like I said, our specie love centralization. Same village priest, same blacksmith, same doctor, same military outposts throughout centuries. We don't keep photos separated and scattered in different rooms in our houses. We don't school kids at home (except for very few rich who can afford). We don't have each a dancing room in our house. We don't scatter tools throughout the house. Need any more proof?
    - leto_ii 7y ago
      > Need any more proof? :) yup, a lot more. I'll address your points individually: 1. > Didn't your grandparents kept all photos in one place? Perhaps, but not sure how this trickles up to societal/economic centralization. 2. > Didn't your parents send you to same school as all other kids in your street? Nope, but again, this would be an instance of societal imposition of structure, or more often due to necessity. If you live in a remote village it's hard to attend a school other than the closest. 3. > Didn't you went to same dancing places like your friends when you started sniffing for girls (I'm assuming you're male, reverse the gender otherwise)? I did, but these places were quite dispersed in space :D. In total we had probably a dozen or so over the years (I come from a big city though, might be different in towns). 4. > Don't you keep your tools in same box(es)? Yes, but again this is an instance of tidiness in daily life, not of societal centralization. To sum up, I think that it can be said that our species prefers order of some kind to pure chaos - this I agree with. I also agree that there are social network effects that cause clustering/centralization of some sort to emerge. I however don't agree that the extreme centralization that we see in the tech/internet space is inevitable or desirable. I also don't see how the natural forces we discussed can lead to such extreme centralization. FB for example built its monopoly by often acquiring/copying its competition. If this had been prevented I think people would have gladly used a broader range of social networks.
Silhouette 7y ago
It's difficult to know what this means since the original document isn't shown so all we have is some quotes that read like political sound bites with little real substance. If it means the EU leadership is finally noticing that it's not creating a particularly business-friendly environment, particularly in the tech sector, then at least that's something, even if it's a decade or two late to the party. On the other hand, if this is just setting up an excuse for the new Commission to wade in with yet more well-intentioned but horribly implemented regulation, I'm afraid that's not going to have the outcome the bureaucrats are hoping for. You can't keep making heavyweight, often ambiguous regulations with disproportionate penalty regimes attached and not expect that to have a chilling effect on entrepreneurialism and investment.
- 0xfaded 7y ago
  The US has google, Russia has yandex, China has baidu. Europe is the only major economic area that has failed to create a tech giant, and I tell people here in Europe that if this plan to create a common data market "works", instead of wasting €10b, I'll stop complaining about the European innovation environment. While regulation is a problem, I think the European public innovation funding system through government grants is a bigger problem. Almost any R&D is partially funded by grants, which means any innovation idea also has to be sold to a board of bureaucrats. There will also be rules affecting things like the maximum salary they will reimburse per employee, which means businesses won't pay for top level talent. Finally, the whole process is a huge waste of human resources on both the companies' and government's side, to the extent that it has spawned a cottage industry of professional proposal writers who take sizeable commission.
  - jialutu 7y ago
    In addition to getting the grants, they also like to see that you are cooperating with a company or entity from another member state. I mean I get the approach is trying to build a cohesion between member states, but as you say, it adds to another layer of bureaucracy. That said, I would really like to see EU build up more of its own home grown tech industry. Although for me being in the UK and now in a limbo with Brexit, I am not sure how that's all gonna affect us here.
mrweasel 7y ago
How about we try something a little simpler first. A single market for movies, series, and music. Ensuring that companies can create streaming services that can be accessed by all 500 million EU citizens without a needless negotiation in all member states for the rights. I say we try that first and see how effectively the EU can actually create a single market, before we try something as fluffy as "data".
- pimmen 7y ago
  I'm not a lawyer or legal expert, but I think that over the past century the entertainment industry has successfully gotten a myriad of laws and court rulings in their favor which complicates something like that a lot. Data is new and fluffy and there are still many areas where it's unsettled who owns the data. The EU probably sees the opportunity to write the rules in a more "blank sheet of paper" kind of way when this industry is still relatively young, and not repeat the mistakes of the entertainment industry where the governments have been sleepwalking for the better part of a century.
- Symbiote 7y ago
  There's something along those lines here (in progress in 2017), but I don't know the status. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/proposal-regulation-laying-down-rules-exercise-copyright-and-related-rights-applicable-certain https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/proposal-...
- pergadad 7y ago
  This is actually not simpler as it's governed by a billion different licensing agreements, rules etc. To give one example: These are nationally negotiated because languages vary. One key and for once reasonable argument for why you need national licenses is the language issue: if you allow more easy transfer across borders the market for translated versions will basically crash as may don't need them - at the same time a number of people to depend on them, and for any smaller country (say: Estonia, Malta, Czechia, even Greece) there simply won't be any more dubbed versions if the English version is more easily available. Another reason is the chance for local players to do anything at all. If you give single licenses basically all the small local players (say a Latvian TV station) will have to pay the same as someone streaming across Europe, and basically anything from football league matches to Hollywood movies will end up locked into the big channels like RTL and Sky.
tu7001 7y ago
As usually EU bureucratic gibberish. Nothing good for us, another regulations, another free market limitations. F*ck EU.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
djdule 7y ago
This text references external document ("The 25-page document also underlined the urgency of the task ahead. "). Is there a link to that document ?

54 points by ckcheng 7y ago

It feels like Europe tries to regulate their way out of their problems, but the instruments of government are too slow compared to the rapid pace of innovation in China and the US.

mrtksn 7y ago
Bureaucrats don’t make the innovations, you cannot innovate fast by having a “fast” government. Dictatorships are very fast, not necessarily very successful. Regulation don’t really matter that much, the US states operate under the same regulations but you don’t have a silicon valley in every state. What EU can do is to enable scale by having a level playing field and market access but even that won’t do anything about the language barriers, so the more successful innovators in EU are those who have good language education(alongside with good science education).
- zhdc1 7y ago
  They can do a good job at cutting down on open corruption though, which is a large part of why EU grants have such a large effort overhead. The EU in large part is trying to bring up the quality of life in eastern/newer member states. Making sure that grant participants from (insert state here) don't steal a large part of the grant award is a very real challenge.

jowday 7y ago

Their use of the word "data" seems incredibly vague.

perceptronas 7y ago

As an european it is hard to read. Government to offer policies to current businesses `to ensure that markets stay open and fair`. Can there be something more evil than this proposal? There cannot be anything more fair than a free market because it allows competition and is voluntary. Laws described are exactly what makes markets unfair

tonyedgecombe 7y ago
There cannot be anything more fair than a free market because it allows competition and is voluntary. Not when it leads to a monopoly.
- perceptronas 7y ago
  If there are no government laws preventing from competition popping up - it cannot lead to a monopoly. (I assume monopoly means certain business can sell their goods priced highly and competition cannot enter with lower prices)
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    >If there are no government laws preventing from competition popping up - it cannot lead to a monopoly. Yes, it can. It is called a natural monopoly and it occurs when cost of entry and effects of scale are so large that the most efficient provider of a good or service is a single supplier. Not only do quite a lot of them exist, they're actually the desirable form of business in those cases as they provide goods at the lowest unit cost to the consumer. They need however to be regulated so that they cannot abuse their market power.
    - perceptronas 7y ago
      Excuse my bad definition, I was referring to 'non-natural' monopolies. On the other note, as a consumer I prefer these natural monopolies exist over that they don't. I would rather have an expensive railway than to not have any railway at all. Obviously investors will want their return on investment. Alternatives with lower capital requirements to setup businesses always exist (rail -> bus/trucks, electricity -> solar panels, internet -> 4G or similar solution, and so on.)
      - modo_mario 7y ago
        Those railways wouldn't exist without the monopoly of the state bringing em about and we've seen how they operate if privatised in the UK and that's still regulated and not even a monopoly. It's shit. Similarly I don't want to see roads privatised because it leads to incredible inefficiency and the open access to the roads provides immense value to the rest of the free market.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

>>> Competitors such as China and the U.S. are already innovating quickly and projecting their concepts of data access and use across the globe,” it said. Wait what? The EU's GDPR is seen as a globally leading "concept of data access and use". Several US states are putting something like it into place, and hoping to get Federal buy in. China, yeah DGAF, but saying "we are behind other governments on data and privacy" seems ... odd. What do they mean then? Is this just a "single market or bust" thing?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

kachurovskiy 7y ago

Did someone read the actual proposal? Article doesn't make sense: free access to some data sets and remove competition rules to improve competition? Hope it's not another incumbent lobby group carving I better deal for themselves.

avocado4 7y ago
There's no specifics mentioned in that article, other than new commons data standards across the industries (good idea IMO).
thepangolino 7y ago
The more time goes, the more I’m disappointed at how out of touch with reality EU legislation is when it comes to technology related issues. I still don’t get why the EU Cookie law put the burden on websites instead of forcing browsers to offer better, more accessible cookie management.
- tomatocracy 7y ago
  The same is true for other non-tech fields. For example, MiFID 2.

unnouinceput 7y ago

Not gonna put a single dent in FAANG. Humans love centralization, we don't like to have things scattered around. It's in our nature, hence there will always be FAANG companies that will have more data than everyone else. Best case scenario EU will have some centralization on their own where people will come and give data there which will achieve nothing more than having EU joining FAANG club. Worse case scenario? EU will implement same stuff like China with their great firewall continuing the current trend to have Splinternet instead of Internet

leto_ii 7y ago
> Humans love centralization, we don't like to have things scattered around. It's in our nature Do you have any proof to back this up? And especially how a desire for tidiness in our daily lives would translate to large scale societal centralization? My strong suspicion is that things are centralized because of the nature of modern/neoliberal capitalism, not human nature. By the same token you could say that human nature made the Soviet Union centralized - we all saw how that went in the end...
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  Proof? Let's see. Didn't your grandparents kept all photos in one place? Didn't your parents send you to same school as all other kids in your street? Didn't you went to same dancing places like your friends when you started sniffing for girls (I'm assuming you're male, reverse the gender otherwise)? Don't you keep your tools in same box(es)? Like I said, our specie love centralization. Same village priest, same blacksmith, same doctor, same military outposts throughout centuries. We don't keep photos separated and scattered in different rooms in our houses. We don't school kids at home (except for very few rich who can afford). We don't have each a dancing room in our house. We don't scatter tools throughout the house. Need any more proof?
  - leto_ii 7y ago
    > Need any more proof? :) yup, a lot more. I'll address your points individually: 1. > Didn't your grandparents kept all photos in one place? Perhaps, but not sure how this trickles up to societal/economic centralization. 2. > Didn't your parents send you to same school as all other kids in your street? Nope, but again, this would be an instance of societal imposition of structure, or more often due to necessity. If you live in a remote village it's hard to attend a school other than the closest. 3. > Didn't you went to same dancing places like your friends when you started sniffing for girls (I'm assuming you're male, reverse the gender otherwise)? I did, but these places were quite dispersed in space :D. In total we had probably a dozen or so over the years (I come from a big city though, might be different in towns). 4. > Don't you keep your tools in same box(es)? Yes, but again this is an instance of tidiness in daily life, not of societal centralization. To sum up, I think that it can be said that our species prefers order of some kind to pure chaos - this I agree with. I also agree that there are social network effects that cause clustering/centralization of some sort to emerge. I however don't agree that the extreme centralization that we see in the tech/internet space is inevitable or desirable. I also don't see how the natural forces we discussed can lead to such extreme centralization. FB for example built its monopoly by often acquiring/copying its competition. If this had been prevented I think people would have gladly used a broader range of social networks.

Silhouette 7y ago

It's difficult to know what this means since the original document isn't shown so all we have is some quotes that read like political sound bites with little real substance. If it means the EU leadership is finally noticing that it's not creating a particularly business-friendly environment, particularly in the tech sector, then at least that's something, even if it's a decade or two late to the party. On the other hand, if this is just setting up an excuse for the new Commission to wade in with yet more well-intentioned but horribly implemented regulation, I'm afraid that's not going to have the outcome the bureaucrats are hoping for. You can't keep making heavyweight, often ambiguous regulations with disproportionate penalty regimes attached and not expect that to have a chilling effect on entrepreneurialism and investment.

0xfaded 7y ago
The US has google, Russia has yandex, China has baidu. Europe is the only major economic area that has failed to create a tech giant, and I tell people here in Europe that if this plan to create a common data market "works", instead of wasting €10b, I'll stop complaining about the European innovation environment. While regulation is a problem, I think the European public innovation funding system through government grants is a bigger problem. Almost any R&D is partially funded by grants, which means any innovation idea also has to be sold to a board of bureaucrats. There will also be rules affecting things like the maximum salary they will reimburse per employee, which means businesses won't pay for top level talent. Finally, the whole process is a huge waste of human resources on both the companies' and government's side, to the extent that it has spawned a cottage industry of professional proposal writers who take sizeable commission.
- jialutu 7y ago
  In addition to getting the grants, they also like to see that you are cooperating with a company or entity from another member state. I mean I get the approach is trying to build a cohesion between member states, but as you say, it adds to another layer of bureaucracy. That said, I would really like to see EU build up more of its own home grown tech industry. Although for me being in the UK and now in a limbo with Brexit, I am not sure how that's all gonna affect us here.

mrweasel 7y ago

How about we try something a little simpler first. A single market for movies, series, and music. Ensuring that companies can create streaming services that can be accessed by all 500 million EU citizens without a needless negotiation in all member states for the rights. I say we try that first and see how effectively the EU can actually create a single market, before we try something as fluffy as "data".

pimmen 7y ago
I'm not a lawyer or legal expert, but I think that over the past century the entertainment industry has successfully gotten a myriad of laws and court rulings in their favor which complicates something like that a lot. Data is new and fluffy and there are still many areas where it's unsettled who owns the data. The EU probably sees the opportunity to write the rules in a more "blank sheet of paper" kind of way when this industry is still relatively young, and not repeat the mistakes of the entertainment industry where the governments have been sleepwalking for the better part of a century.
Symbiote 7y ago
There's something along those lines here (in progress in 2017), but I don't know the status. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/proposal-regulation-laying-down-rules-exercise-copyright-and-related-rights-applicable-certain https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/proposal-...
pergadad 7y ago
This is actually not simpler as it's governed by a billion different licensing agreements, rules etc. To give one example: These are nationally negotiated because languages vary. One key and for once reasonable argument for why you need national licenses is the language issue: if you allow more easy transfer across borders the market for translated versions will basically crash as may don't need them - at the same time a number of people to depend on them, and for any smaller country (say: Estonia, Malta, Czechia, even Greece) there simply won't be any more dubbed versions if the English version is more easily available. Another reason is the chance for local players to do anything at all. If you give single licenses basically all the small local players (say a Latvian TV station) will have to pay the same as someone streaming across Europe, and basically anything from football league matches to Hollywood movies will end up locked into the big channels like RTL and Sky.

tu7001 7y ago

As usually EU bureucratic gibberish. Nothing good for us, another regulations, another free market limitations. F*ck EU.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

djdule 7y ago

This text references external document ("The 25-page document also underlined the urgency of the task ahead. "). Is there a link to that document ?