1. Business-to-government data sharing for the public interest

BDI statement on the EU Data Act in the public consultation

1. Business-to-government data sharing for the public interest

In the area of B2G data sharing, the BDI still considers voluntary cooperation to be preferable to access obligations for data in the „public interest“. A structural (market) failure that would justify legislative intervention in the form of an access obligation is still not discernible here.2 The COVID 19 pandemic has made it clear that a large number of companies from a wide range of sectors are already cooperating very unselfishly and successfully with public authorities.

Against this background, the BDI also considers the EU Commission's justification for a possible introduction of a statutory data access obligation in the Inception Impact Assessment to be questionable, insofar as commercialisation interests of companies are cited as the reason for the lack of willingness to cooperate on data with the public sector. In fact, by successfully offering data-based services and business models, many companies open up opportunities for public authorities to participate in the knowledge gained from them. In this respect, the EU Commission's assumption that a lack of data from companies is the reason for the "limited ability of the public sector to develop data models itself"3 is not substantiated. This ignores the fact that the skills, knowledge and resources to pursue datadriven innovation within the public sector are still largely underdeveloped. Rather, the public sector should take the recent - and very good - initiatives on open data and the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive) and the proposal on European Data Governance (Data Governance Act) as an opportunity to better process its own public data and make it available to the public.

Should the plans for B2G data sharing obligations nevertheless be implemented, it is imperative that the scope of the „public interest“ must be clarified and specified, and that a careful weighing of costs and risks be carried out. Such narrowly defined use cases are conceivable, for example, in the area of security or the protection of life and limb, but must be clearly defined in a context-specific manner. In addition, such a data sharing obligation must be accompanied by an adequate compensation mechanism that appropriately acknowledges the often time-consuming data preparation and analysis on the company side. The compensation regulations proposed in the report of the high-level expert group on B2G are a good basis for this. The EU Commission should continue the stakeholder dialogue here.

Kommentiert [DMD1]: Statstics?

2 This was also confirmed, for example, by the European Commission itself in its Communication from 2018 (SWD (2018) 125), which issues corresponding guidance in the B2B, B2G area: "A broad stakeholder dialogue was conducted on the basis of that Communication. It concluded that the issue at stake did not justify horizontal legislative intervention at this stage and that guidance would be more appropriate." 3 IIA, P. 2.

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