“The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation nda) is the” theater “of data protection, more than a real protection: press ok on the conditions and everything is fine, while in reality huge amounts of personal data continue to run out in the pockets of the great American platforms ». Sitting in the hall of the Turin Palace Hotel, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger adjusts his glasses and continues his merciless analysis of European data management strategies. He also has some for the new GAIA-X European cloud project: «We use industrial policy solutions of the 20th century to face a challenge of the 21st century».
The professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the University of Oxford is in Turin to present his new book “Out of the data!” At the Politecnico, written jointly with the journalist Thomas Ramge, in which he articulates a proposal to relaunch the role of ‘Europe in the international digital chessboard. The starting point is to break the monopoly on information, by overcoming the GDPR with a new General Regulation on the use of data. The thesis of the book is clear: access to data must be opened to everyone in order to relaunch progress and innovation. And Europe, today crushed in the grip of the “technological cold war” between the United States and China, must play a leading role in building a new digital ecosystem based on the free circulation of information.
The Data Governance Act can be a starting point, but one has to deal with necessary compromises, both between European countries and within the European Commission itself. «We are moving in the direction of greater access to data, but in small steps – explains Mayer-Schönberger -. Mind you, the GDPR is not all wrong, but the strategy of putting all the responsibility on the shoulders of users, rather than on companies, is wrong. When we go to the supermarket to buy food we don’t do chemical analyzes of everyone we buy, we know that the supermarket is responsible for what it sells, why aren’t Facebook or Google? In the digital world, there are no perpetrators. We need to improve the GDPR in this direction ».
And this is the perfect time. We are “experiencing a period of frenetic stagnation of innovation,” the authors write again in the book, due to the scarce availability of data for those who could use it to generate value. We find ourselves living in a paradoxical situation: it is not the data that are scarce, but their use. Today about seven times more data is collected than is actually used, 80 percent of this not only does not create value, but destroys it, because the costs of collecting and storing are not compensated by the development of new knowledge. And the data is not available because it is concentrated in the hands of a few major players (Chinese and American). Increasing its protection or allowing its use for a fee risks having an even more damaging effect. We must not prohibit its use, but allow it and encourage it under the right conditions.
This situation is also reflected in the ecosystem of startups, which have long since ceased to be the engines of innovation. The fault lies with the millionaire (sometimes billionaire) exit strategies, a tool of Big Tech to eliminate competition. «The real dream of a young entrepreneur is to become the new Steve Job, to create the new Google – explains Viktor -, not to be bought by a big company. So why do they accept exits? Money of course, but above all because they have no possibility to scale and this is because they do not have access to data. If an entrepreneur in Europe has a great idea, he makes a prototype, goes online and asks a big company: “Will you buy me?” ».
To reverse the trend, it is necessary to create a world of open data, starting a second revolution of open data. The first involved public data, not always with great results, now we need to broaden the discussion to private data. To do this, it is good to understand what went wrong with the public data and not repeat the same mistakes. “Many governments have made a lot of data accessible, but not the interesting ones. An example above all: in Austria data on the location of public toilets have been made accessible, they are definitely not data of value – emphasizes Viktor Mayer-Schönberger -. Or in Germany local public transport data is made available, but statically, the real-time data is only provided to Google, which pays. And then we must consider the quality of the data, the taxonomy, the format. We must invest in shared standards “
Where to start then? From the scientific sector, for example, where accessibility and sharing work very well. Also thanks to the policies adopted: funding is often tied to making research results accessible. The book proposes to introduce the obligation of accessibility starting from large companies (two parameters are proposed to define the large ones: revenues exceeding 25 million dollars and more than 100 thousand customers). As for the little ones, if they require access to the data of others, they will have to reciprocate by opening their own data as well. In this way, even apparently useless data could become valuable, if managed by third parties, who use them for reasons other than those for which they are collected.
But how to convince Big Tech? We need laws and sanctions. «For example, if an American company wants to buy a European startup, it could be forced to make the data used through the acquisition“ open ”- explains Viktor -. We would not eliminate the problem of exit strategies, but we would make it less poisonous ». Europe must decide what role it wants to play: to become a colonial third country in the field of data or to start a new paradigm? A paradigm that must be based on what Europe made Europe: the Enlightenment. Europe should become a region of open access to data, extending to encompass the whole world, this is the thesis of the book. An ambitious but realistic process, as Viktor explains: «Europe can play this role because it is a large and interesting market. The same happened with the GDPR: Facebook and Google and the other big companies complained about the GDPR and said “now Europe could lose our services, we could leave Europe”. Europe did not give up and in the end the big companies had to accept it ».
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