For us laymen it would be as if they opened us access to the Library of Babel of Borges’ story, but with a further difficulty: all the books written in Sanskrit. What could we get out of it? In a certain sense, this is what the essay “Out of the data!” Proposes. of the Egea editions (ie of the Bocconi University): to make the incalculable amount of information stored in the archives of web giants accessible to all; to make it truly accessible, of course, not only in theory, that is, to make it something actually usable to users. Will I be possible? The two authors say yes, and they understand: they are Thomas Ramge (researcher at the Center of Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum) and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger (professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the University of Oxford). It should be done at the European level, and the first step to do so would be to go beyond the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of 2016 with one inspired by the new philosophy.
The authors’ proposal starts from an observation: in the last twenty years the giants of the digital sector have progressively managed to concentrate an impressive amount of data on their servers. These are monopolistic concentrations of information, which if they can be good for the shareholders of large corporations, are bad for progress. According to Ramge and Mayer-Schönberger, in fact, “we live in a period of frenetic stagnation of innovation”: in the United States and in the Western world in general, productivity gains are at historically low levels, and an increasingly reduced number of companies most patents, a further indicator of the decline in the innovative power of the economy. The main reason for this slowdown would be the scarce availability of data for those who – using them – could generate value: from technicians to workers, from innovative startups to traditional companies, from those involved in social policies to NGOs. Today about seven times more data are collected than those that are used even just once: this means that over 80% of these not only do not create value but destroy it, since the collection and storage phase involves costs that are not then offset by the development of new knowledge.
According to the authors, the time would be ripe to force digital “superstars” to share their treasure. It would not be a question of expropriating Big Tech, given that in a strictly legal sense data cannot be “owned” and does not even disappear if more subjects use them. From an economic point of view, in fact, data is a “non-rival good”, which is transformed into value only when it is used and whose value actually increases with each additional use.
But a revolution of this magnitude could not start either from the United States of Silicon Valley or from a China committed to achieving the status of the first digital superpower in the world: the task, therefore, would fall to a Europe that, if on the one hand it has placed the the theme of “digital sovereignty” and technological innovation as one of the main challenges to be faced in order to relaunch itself, on the other hand it must deal with an “almost religious version of data protection” which is helping to generate an increasingly scarce availability of the latter . “Europe”, say Ramge and Mayer-Schönberger, “should attack where the United States and China are weaker than they think: in their real capacity for innovation. European politics can resist the power of digital monopolies by empowering innovative entrepreneurs and a new generation of entrepreneurs able to seize opportunities ”. To succeed, however, it is necessary to overcome the GDPR and its integration with a new General Regulation on the use of data, inaugurating a system that makes mandatory (and easily) accessible information not subject to confidentiality constraints (from personal data to industrial secrets) on the basis of well-defined parameters designed to facilitate their sharing by the largest and smallest subjects, forcing the latter to reciprocate only if they want to draw from the source. A digital ecosystem that – in the hopes of the authors – could not be limited to Europe but should also aim to welcome and involve developing countries with the aim of creating a large region of open access to information. And put an end to “data colonialism”.