BRUSSELS - The European Union wants to create a single market in data aimed at challenging the dominance of tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon, according to a European Commission proposal seen by Reuters.
The proposal, which includes reining in big online platforms and could still be tweaked ahead of their presentation on Feb. 19, underlines the EU’s determination to break U.S. tech giants’ stranglehold on vast troves of data and better compete with Chinese rivals. By capitalizing on Europe’s vast quantities of industrial and professional data and technological innovation, the bloc can surge ahead, the document said.It said the objective is “to create a single European data space, a genuine single market for data”.
Other rules in the coming months will open up more public data on geospatial, the environment, meteorology, statistics and companies’ data across the bloc for companies to use for free.