Building a European data economy - a BusinessEurope position paper

Key messages

Digitalisation can be at the heart of Europe. The EU must timely complete the digital single market, ensuring free movement of data to take full advantage of the digital transformation and compete effectively worldwide.
Europe needs to adopt an innovation-friendly approach to data to empower the digitalisation process and offer robust solutions for data use. Policy-makers should carefully assess if and where action is needed.
The European legislative framework for data must allow companies to compete globally, foster the creation of new business models and ensure a level playing field, with legal certainty and stability.

Data ownership, access and liability issues are adequately addressed by existing legislation. Current rules and practices allow adapting to the needs of the parties and provide the appropriate setting to share data based on contractual terms, allowing innovation.
The current framework is fit to address liability issues in the field of IoT and no new liability rules for data-related services and products are needed. Adapted or dedicated liability rules could be however required, in specific situations for completely autonomous systems.
EU legislative action to remove restrictions to the free flow of data is needed. The ability to transfer data across borders is crucial for companies, both within the single market and beyond. Any forced data localisation requirements should be subject to EU scrutiny and should only be kept if proportionate and in line with EU legislation and single market principles.

EUR 566 billion - Expected value of the data economy by 2020
41% of EU enterprises - Not using digital technologies at all
EUR 3.4 to 9.8 trillion/year - Year 2025: IoT market’s expected economic impact until then ≈ 11 % of world economy