Data Regulation: Understanding The Present To Regulate The Future

GAMES Econ’s Director Juan Delgado reflects at CPI’s TechREG Chronicle on what existing data regulation can tell us about data regulation in tech industries. Juan concludes that shortcuts to data regulation do not exist.

The facts that data is not a commodity and that the strategic value of data differs from industry to industry, varies over time, and depends on the level of aggregation imply that data regulation is necessarily a case-by-case exercise that requires specific solutions to well-defined specific problems. 

The current EU approaches to data regulation (the European Data Strategy and the Digital Markets Act) ignore these facts and attempt to regulate data through generic principles. 

A more flexible evidence-based approach to data regulation is likely to be more workable and effective in solving potential market failures in data intensive industries.

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