Cross-border data flow in the digital single market: study on data location restrictions (SMART 2015/0054) Nature of the barrier
Objective / driver behind the barrier
Potential solution?
A specific mandate under law or from a specific body is required to export the data
Maintaining national control over cultural systems and services for the protection of national heritage against loss
Clarification that the rule was intended to protect physical artefacts with heritage value, which may be lost abroad. Duplication of electronic data should not pose the same problem.
Storage facilities must be within national borders, or they may be outside national borders but a copy must be made to a mirror system within national borders
Ensuring accountability verifiability
Clarification that the fundamental requirement is to ensure the integrity and auditability of the information. Local storage or mirroring a system is not the only way of achieving this goal.
and
2.4. Establishing an analytical framework for identified barriers – defining a common understanding of data requirements in the EU Member States The section above has provided a first insight in some of the principal regulatory barriers that may restrict the free flow of data for processing and storage purposes within the European Digital Single Market, along with the drivers behind them, and some of the solutions that might be explored to resolve them. It should be recognised that the scope of this overview is not exhaustive; however, given the methodology that relied on national experts to obtain key examples of barriers to the free flow of data, the listing undoubtedly contains the principal barriers and can at any rate be considered as representative for the state of play across the EU. While the overview above did not yet aim to identify non-regulatory barriers – these will be further examined in the sections below - it is however possible at this stage to provide a provisional analytical framework that can be used to describe and assess these barriers, based on their key characteristics. The purpose of this analytical framework is twofold:
Firstly, the framework is intended to provide an overview of existing data requirements that may be encountered across the EU. It should thus be possible to classify every barrier mentioned above into a specific section of the analytical framework, and to describe it accurately. Secondly, it is intended to allow the definition of common solutions to common problems, allowing barriers to be mitigated or overcome.
Broadly, the following structure could be proposed in relation to regulatory barriers, which is intended to be designed so that it can be applied to any type of data (i.e. it is not dependent on sector specific elements). The elements in bright blue designate specific types of barriers encountered:
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